He was lamenting the loss of a particular forum with one of the other guys. “All just on Facebook now”, he said, and he said it with sadness. He missed that old forum.
Perhaps if forums could talk to each other you'd have an experience more like mastodon, but in concepts that more people understand.
Something like an open source Stack Exchange network. So you can log-in to one of them but then easily create an account using the credentials of the original forum that you signed in from.
Edit: I know discourse [0] is kind of working along these lines, but I don't think they're designed to have activity between forums.
Perhaps it could just be called 'Friend Forums'.
Though, maybe discourse has gotten better since I tried it a couple of years ago.
It follows standards that you need to know if you want to be able to easily hack it.
Which means learning standards.
Ruby On Rails is really powerful, but it is not easy to start hacking on without a fair amount of base knowledge. In addition, discourse uses a lot of javascript, which makes it even more difficult to modify. The barrier to entry, in terms of creating a custom template, is quite high. You need to learn quite a few things before getting started.
On the other hand, hacking something like a Wordpress template takes almost zero knowledge. You can just start poking at things.
The lack of a relatively simple templating system is a big drawback in Discourse. Especially if you're not a rails developer, and you're running a community forum as a hobby.
I know how to program because of software such as phpbb and Wordpress, which are pretty much hacked together. Maybe because they're hacks, they have easier entry points.
I do think the Discourse people have different goals than I'm talking about here, however. If their goal was to make software that was easy to modify, hack, and deploy, they would have made different choices.
WordPress has both it's own forum bbPress and it's social network buddyPress. As far as a hackable system for everyone it's an attractive start. WP is based around the concept of everyone installing their own. Their 5-minute install is still the gold standard as far as I'm concerned.
So as controversial as it is on HN I think the idea of using PHP is still a sound one. But as a geek I'd much rather go down the Python route in some kind of homage to the foundation of reddit.
Python is a great language for beginners to learn and it's designed for them. Plus it's still a very relevant skill to learn.
https://insightful.demo.talkyard.io/-7/how-do-i-get-myself-o...
2. Single sign-on, and (as you wrote), "using the credentials of the original forum":
What about using Scuttlebut's identities? Everyone has his/her own ed25519 key pair. "The public key is used as the identifier", see: http://scuttlebot.io/more/protocols/secure-scuttlebutt.html. These can be created in a decentralized manner. The keys are really long, but maybe, in a specific forum, one wouldn't need to show the whole key. One could instead show a forum-local-@username + the shortest unique key prefix (unique in that forum).
I despise cynics who in the process of underestimating others crash the party, our party.
If the man wants his damn forum back give him his forum, in as many possible flavours and sizes as we possibly can. Then let him deliverate, hopefully learn and ultimately adapt.
Distributed community discussion/chat clients, with universal single-sign-on, could maybe be equally simple?
Two tricky tech things could be 1) how to share one's key, between all one's devices. And 2) how can all one's browser tabs, and discussion apps, get access to the key, once it's installed on localhost? without being able to steal the private key.
(If one is a Scuttlebut developer, though, then one might need to know about ed25519 identities.)
https://artplusmarketing.com/discussing-a-decentralised-redd...
It would hopefully avert the issue Reddit like sites have where different groups want to control what others can say on the platform, by taking control out of the hands of a large corporation.
> Of course, it still raises questions about how it’d be financed or supported. No investor would back a service that couldn’t be controlled at all and could lose most of its userbase overnight.
I think the WordPress/WooCommerce model works for this. So you handle forum set up for businesses, or have paid for plugins. You can also still have a centralised system like basically reddit/wordpress.com , but allow subdomains just to be redirected to someones own domain (all for a minor cost).
Anyway, you wrote (in the blog): "independently hosted forums" — I like that, for various reasons.
Actually, I might slightly have built a Reddit alternative minus single-sign-on. Here's an a bit Reddit like discussion:
https://www.talkyard.io/forum/-61859/forum-software-for-the-...
And one can create per site sub communities, a bit like subreddits. Actually, there are improvements over Reddit: https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-... . Someone is actually emailing with me about migrating their subreddits from Reddit to a Talkyard community at their own domain.
You wrote: "It would be a very complicated forum aggregator with a ton of features necessary to create the combined community side like on Reddit or its alternatives." — I agree. And it'd also be lovely with a mobile phone app, that could connect to all these disparate communities. So one didn't need to type the address in the mobile phone browser. Instead one just clicked in a list of recently visited communities. And it showed notifications too. ... A bit like mobile Facebook and Reddit, but connected to 999 decentralized communities.
I've been thinking a bit about building this mobile app, and forum aggregator / search engine. And initially make it work with Discourse (https://www.discourse.org), Flarum (http://flarum.org) and Talkyard (https://www.talkyard.io).
Discourse is just another forum software, but it's open source and you can setup your own. Jeff's taken some of the ideas from StackOverflow and tried to apply them to forums. To be honest I think most people are happy with regular forums, they work as you expect and there aren't many rules to learn. I've come across Discourse forums a couple of times. Plotly charts use Discourse for their forum [0]. They work well, but as you say Discourse tried to rebrand the forum and so introduces a layer that most people just won't get.
https://www.proboards.com/ is still around but doesn't have global accounts as far as I can remember.
I'm not convinced there's much payoff waiting for you if you were to create such a system.
I think that Reddit's format is so popular because you get to just scroll a stream of provocative/vetted headlines. Even the comments are geared in a way where you're scrolling a stream of one-off provocative comments. There is no long form conversation over time. Everything is ephemeral.
By the way, kind of interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard#Technology
Of all places, G+ does reasonably well at this, with a suitably selective group.
Mailing lists / usenet are still probably the pinacle.
Even worse, the only person who might see it is the one person you responded to since it's in the profile comment feed, and a back-and-forth isn't very interesting.
This makes forums much different where each new reply bumps the topic into the eyes of any number of people who are online.
The upstream is wrong. Avatars and (ugh) signatures don't make a forum. Being able to converse over time is what does it. That's how you get to know regulars beyond spotting their one-off posts per submission.
https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-...
Because: 1) when you post a comment, the topic bumps to the top of the topic list. Like a normal forum. 2) inside the topic, people quickly find the recent comments, via the sidebar (as shown in the video "Finding new comments").
(B.t.w. agree that Reddit & HN feel ephemeral. I remember maybe 2 usernames here at HN, and 2 at Reddit, although having spent a lot more time here, than what I've done at Discoure's forum — nevertheless I remember many more people over at Discourse.)
The mentions there work nicely too, I never get swamped with inbox messages, you can only mention one person in a comment, so there's no @channel nonsense as with Slack.
It somewhat hurts HN as well, IMO.
The ability to express yourself in all it's unprofessional ways is important. It's a way to show you're not Facebook. Each topic is built up from the colours of the people that participate there. Individual expression is allowed. Then it's just up to the forum owners to decide what crosses the line.
I've developed my own set of, ugh, "collateral" -- avatar, icon, hero -- which seem to work well across several sites. I find the anchoring works pretty well. And see the same for others I follow, again, both over time and sites.
Mostly: G+, Ello, Twitter, Mastodon.
Reddit, HN, and Metafilter would be exceptions.
Reddit now has profile images too but they are only displayed there.
Pick a few niches and make a new account that only subscribes to small subreddits about them; it really does put a community feel to it all.
I remember when I knew everyone on rec.sports.basketball.college and then the damn web came along, and everyone was on the internet.
I used to miss some things about newsgroups. For years, I missed the simplicity with which I could make a local copy of a news article for offline use -- something the web was always pretty bad at doing in such a way that I could count on being able to read the article while offline. But eventually I noticed that I almost never read those local copies (even though 25 years later they still exist on my current local machine and being plain text are still easy to read in isolation).
If something on a web page does not register as interesting right away, but only after I've gone on to the next web page, the page after that, then the page after that, I can with .999 reliability go back to the web page that I've slowly come to consider interesting. (In other words, I can use the browser's history menu or history page to return to the page that was current 3 pages ago -- or 5 pages ago or whatever.)
Going back to the news article I was reading 3 articles ago on the other hand was much less reliable. I learned how to use the arrow keys combined with the "tree view" in trn to get the reliability of the operation "go back 3 articles" up to something like .6, and going back one article could be done (with the = key in trn IIRC) with a single keystroke with a reliability of about .85, but if the article I wanted to go back to had fallen off an edge of the "tree view" (which consisted of no more than about 35 columns and 16 lines) then I would just give up on ever getting another look at the article.
Of course this deficiency of newsgroups could've been fixed simply by someone's writing another newsreader, followed by my switching to it, but there were other things about newsgroups not so easily fixed that discouraged reflection and contemplation: for example, chances were about .07 that that the parent or any particular child (i.e., reply to) the article one was looking at was missing from one's news server. Often this had a predictable reason (i.e., many news servers culled articles over 30 days old, and the parent is probably older than that) but it was not rare for it to happen for no discernible reason.
In other words, for me, a reflective reader, i.e., a reader who often wants to revisits things he read 10 minutes ago or a few hours ago that at the time of the initial reading I did not consider interesting and consequently did not bother to bookmark or make a local copy of (the rough newsgroup analog to the making a bookmark to a web page), the web or at least the web of the 1990s was a significant improvement over newsgroups.
Each forum could still have their own domain and installation.
Ideally it would be in some way compatible to existing forums.
Perhaps better integration of forums via RSS. One thing regular forums tend to still have is RSS feeds built in. They can also be a nice go between of email and online users (although as has been said many times, email an be the death of forums).