I read an interesting point which I hadn't realized before. Discussions on current social media are always current, not long term. You open the app or website to see what's going on now. When you comment, it's soon lost to history, buried by newer stuff. If you happen on a post more than a day or two old, it doesn't make sense to comment as it's already passed and nobody will read your reply. You're not building anything of long term value. It was not like this in forums that predated social media. You could reply to a years old thread, and it would be bumped to the head of the queue. I suppose both the form of social media with its feeds and the algorithms designed to hook you and make you come for more are to blame.
How could we make kbin or fediverse in general more purposeful long term and less for instant gratification? Going back to old forum form is probably not the answer, but maybe something between feeds and forums or even something entirely new? With fediverse we have the opportunity to build something better and more useful than what we have now, as we are not bound by the economic imperative to make the users hooked.
I would argue that the current form of Lemmy (and kbin, and lotide) is a lot like a forum, to the point that there's a phpbb front-end.
I think the key to long-term discussions is going to be having small enough communities that you can recognize the other people you're talking with.
Once you recognize the person you're talking with, then the conversation naturally becomes a continuation of the last one.
My soapbox instance is a good example. There's a number of people that I routinely have discussions with, and because I recognize those people and I know who they are, and I know where they're coming from, we don't need to rehash earlier forms of the discussion. Instead, we can keep the conversation going even though the Twitter style conversation thread would suggest that you can't do that.
One of the things that I think will help in the long term is having profile pictures. Somebody who's having a conversation with me may not remember my specific name, but the icon next to my message is going to be the same and so they will remember the last time that they had a conversation with me.
I think that that sort of long-term conversation also might help with some mutual tolerance. You see someone, and you know their views and so you end up having a conversation with the person rather than with the class of people that they represent.
I think that's one of the biggest problems in political discourse online today, is that instead of people having conversations, people have conversations with classes of people as represented by one other person. In that way, there can't be any nuance because not agreeing with the class that you represent is itself a sort of own, instead of common ground two individuals can agree with.
That's just not feasible once the fediverse grows more. You're expecting people to memorize hundreds of names/avatar images or else stay in a tiny echochamber in order to know the people. And doesn't address the issue of other people coming in and having to scour numerous threads and comments to follow your "conversation".
Unfortunately, the problem is that it's big, and as reddit shows us, threading won't fix anything.
The fediverse however can grow in decentralized ways so there's smaller more tight-knit communities that know each other instead of megacommunities where everyone is just a molecule of water in the stream
Tell me you didn't grow up using forums without telling me you didn't use forums. There's a reason even discord has added forums back. They work.
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I did grow up with forums. They key though is that communities are much weaker today despite many still having threaded conversations. Back then you'd get to know people because there were few enough people to know. Today when you have a subreddit with millions of users it doesn't matter that there's threads or not because due to sheer volume it's all ephemeral.
Again, tell me you've never been on a large forum without telling me.