I miss traditional message boards. No karma, no sorting algorithms, you just get new topics on top and replies are sorted oldest to newest.
You can have forum threads that go on for decades, but Lemmy’s default sorting system quickly sweeps older content away. I’m aware you can mimic the forum format by selecting the “chat” option in a thread and sorting by old, and you can sort posts by “latest comment” which replicates the old-school forum experience pretty well, but nobody does it that way, so the community behaves in the manner facilitated by the default sorting algorithm that prioritizes new content over old but still relevant content.
I also notice that I don’t pay attention to usernames on Lemmy (or Reddit back when I was on it). They’re just disembodied thoughts floating through the ether. On message boards, I get to know specific users, their personalities and preferences and ups and downs. I notice when certain users don’t post for a while and miss them if they’re gone for too long.
you can do that here too.
And I point that out in the OP, but my point is it’s not the default so the community culture doesn’t encourage long term discussion. I’ve tried making a single megathread for all my content on a particular community but it never went anywhere because, to everyone else who wasn’t sorting posts and comments as described above, the post just dropped off the front page after a day or two never to be seen again.
think of it this way: your post would drop off eventually no matter what. But if you write a great post, it will be seen by far more people than would have normally seen it.
No you can’t. Only the top level comments are sorted, not the nested ones.
I’m using Thunder (android app) and the sorting does apply to nested comments
“I know”