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.
facebook groups really killed off long term availability of information. If you want true niche communities, and easy to find information, you have to go looking for true old school forums (xenforo, phpbb, vbulletin etc). so many forums I used to use had a mass exodus to facebook.
Reddit doesn't really help either, it's still centred around instant gratification and doomscrolling.
Just look at say one of the largest woodworking forums (www.woodworkforums.com), vs /r/woodworking. The forums are full of subforums so filtering information is easy. Default sort is by newest response, so if you bump a week/month/year old post, it will get noticed. The combination of easy to find information, and the display mode reduces duplication of information.
Whereas /r/woodworking is mostly just a showcase of work, minimal conversation, and minimal advice. It might as well be instagram. If you respond to a 2 day old post with a question, good luck having anyone even read it, let alone respond.
A lot of forms ceased to exist after facebook came along, or at least exist to the same extent. Facebook groups are horrible. Searching for information/help is so hard, no one does it, so you get the same questions over and over. it's easier to post your question, wait for a response, than it is to actually search for the same question that was asked just the other day! My other issue with facebook groups is there are so many of them (I am in three or four for once hobby). You see a post in your feed, accidentally cause a feed refresh, and do you think you can find that post again? nigh on impossible.
I'd love to see kbin/lemmy introduce a solid tagging system, or sub communities somehow so information can be stored and accessed in a meaningul way.
eg
/m/woodworking/furniture
/m/woodworking/tools
etc etc.