They can fork phpbb. You didn’t really think these social networks are anything more than that?
We just need to see if phpbb can scale to a billion, and if not, why not.
We just need to see if phpbb can scale to a billion, and if not, why not.
The UK's largest "social" sites are pretty much forums (e.g. Mumsnet, The Student Room, DigitalSpy, MoneySavingExpert) and while they're good for their respective topics, they don't cover the Reddit/Facebook/Instagram use cases (they could be arguably considered on a par with individual sub-reddits).
If you make each individual bulletin board receive broadcasts from a central server, then you get the network effects of Facebook and Reddit. Individual boards can just sub to the central server keeping them connected to the hivemind or not. Your community can remain isolated or throttled (only 30% of global updates get through). We do this manually here, where not all global posts get through (you'd be hard pressed to push a Reddit post to the top here). It's the simplest way to federate using existing technology.
This model is already at play. X, Bluesky, Reddit, Truth Social, and Rumble are basically heavily funded private message boards with a large mindshare subscriber base.
Taking our message boards back is proving to be difficult, especially because trying to move the userbase off of it is the same as trying to move people off drugs.
Your're doing this with phpBB? Doesn't happen to be open-source somewhere?
Would be interesting to have a look, I think I a bit like this opt-in partial federation / hivemind. Would be even more interesting if it was possible to sync comments between such forums.
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Developing forum software myself, Talkyard. Based in Europe (Sweden).
Started thinking even more about using some European cloud, as an option. There's a Swedish hosting provider that looks interesting (I think)
I guess you could do syncing kind of like how CCing email is done. CC my home server and global server. This gives you agency to remain detached from the hivemind, and vice versa. This is not some idea out of left field, it's roughly my workflow between Reddit or HN or other sites. I manually do the filtering in my mind when I move through different channels.
Phpbb is open source, but I mostly brought it up to show that Facebook is just that, and nothing more. Forking Reddit will also give you a Facebook clone (and a Reddit clone).
Websearched for "phpBB federation" and "phpbb subscribe rss broadcasts", found this:
"Feed post bot: This extension enables you to read any RSS, ATOM or RDF feed. It looks for new items every half hour and post them to a specified forum." https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=456&t=241159...
Intering way to use RSS
No need for that, we are just half a billion in Europe.