Don't Contribute Anything Relevant in Web Forums Like Reddit (2020)
karl-voit.at
karl-voit.at
While his message is certainly relevant for _most_ forum software, i feel compelled to point out one which enables anyone to clone the whole forum, in full, and sync it at will for local use (with two-way sync if the remote admin enables that (on a per-account basis)).
Though fossil is an SCM/DVCS, one of its features is a built-in forum in active use by both the fossil project and sqlite (https://sqlite.org/forum).
With such a forum, anyone can clone it, host their own copy somewhere (it only requires a low-end HTTP server capable of hosting CGIs), and pull updates from the upstream copy as often as they like. If/when the upstream goes dark, none of the content is lost.
Edit: granted, fossil's forum is intended to be on the scale of one project per form. It is not, and will never be, a multi-project forum like HN, Reddit, or whatever the cool kids are using nowadays.
Why bother playing by big platform rules? They will never ever adjust course in your favour. They have their own goals and individual contributions are content to be farmed.
I can not post the majority of my views and content without being suppressed, so time to walk.
I can back up all the data on Reddit or Twitter and I can jealously guard my hoard of posts and Tweets and memes like a dragon guarding rubies. But who's going to come read them all? Who's going to post? Who's going to create an account, twiddle with their profile, add a cute avvie?
The whole point of forums and social media is building a community around them. If Hacker News deleted every post and every comment and we had an unrecoverably blank website tomorrow, we would still have thousands of users to post and rebuild it. If dang banned every user and deleted every account and shut down registration, no manner of hot spares or offsite backups could save us, he'd be a jealous dragon sleeping on a mountain of sparkling rubies.
And community-building is the thing that's caused the problem depicted in TFA. If you build a really nice walled garden, then a community flocks to it and sets up shop and builds little dollhouses there. Successful centralized social media builds communities and keeps them loyal.
Something like Usenet built communities around a protocol and an abstraction: anyone could join Usenet from any connected computer, and post using their email address. Their posts could be distributed everywhere else and synchronized. This is the kind of ideal decentralized community that we've lost in the intervening years.
the author's main concern is data loss, hence backups