Sustainable Forum Software
Notes on creating forum software that is sustainable
Created:
Status: DRAFT / work in progress
These are my thoughts on “Sustainable Forum Software”.
As I recall, In early 2000s, Forums were one of the predominant ways in which people interacted over the internet, even before blogs were a thing.
Forums continued to evolve:
- reddit (the forum for the whole web, instead of just being a special interest group); I was an early user, having known Aaron, who was one of the co-founders.
- discourse - forum software in response to wresting back control from stackoverflow etc., plus also to escape the bad days of PHP software. These are popular with programming communities - e.g: OCaml, and even some “Group of friends” forum like the one hosted by recently deceased Autodesk founder John Walker’s, Scanalyst
I’m sure there are a lot many more that I have no idea about, and that’s alright.
My own thoughts are inspired by the following observations:
- Forums have excellent value as a place to grow and sustain community over time
- They work great in asynchronous mode
- they allow for long-running, sustainable conversations (modulo good moderation) (i’m thinking of metafilter, {and even some subreddits, as incredulous it may sound to some}).
What is missing:
- “Friends first”. One thing closed gardens like Discord have done is create a sense of private space with like-minded people, and among anonymous-first, and anonymous-always users. There is a need for an “asynchronous discord”, that works on organic invites.
- A move away from walled gardens, and towards “self-hostable” software, even if the software is hosted on a PaaS or even a service provider.
- When a “group” comes to an end, there should be a one-click method to archive the group with zero maintenance – should be exportable to a simple HTML format.
What I want to see:
- lightweight - run on small virtual machines
- indexable
- cacheable
- archivable
- low-maintenance (not NPM / PyPI breakage)
- data-first over ui-first ( whether it is microformats, ARIA, semantic HTML, and all of them)
- least number of moving parts.
- Server side generation.
- [OPT] Desktop first; take time
Some inspirations for this are:
Both DFeed and NimForum satisfy a lot of the above conditions, but given they were designed with “Classic Forum” (and even NNTP/newsserver support in DFeed’s case), they are too big for the “Friends First” approach.
Perhaps, starting with NimForum, and adding a few features to make it fit “Friends First” approach would be a good start.
To be continued …