This year, I want to participate in more forums. Things without a character limit. I’m already a proud member of the 32 bit café forum and love reading new entries via RSS, so what other forums are out there? I would dearly like to see forums for audiobooks, genre romance, and places like the 32 bit café that will let me share my blog posts. Bonus points if it has an RSS feed. #Forum#Forums
One complaint that I have about modern internet social spaces, ie Reddit and Discord, is their locked in controlled spaces. I came to Mastodon for the federated space. I came from the days of unique forums, RSS, and multiple chat options. What I would love to see is a federated Forum system. But what would that look like and how would that work? I am not sure. What are your thoughts?
We soft launched the Johto Times forum a week ago, and so far we have 55 users who have made over 400 posts. It's early days, but the conversations I have seen across the forum is reflecting what I wanted: a nice close-knit community!
But a forum is a hard sell to people in the social media age!
I do want to mention that we have had a lot of users come from Mastodon, which is nice to see. You have all been very supportive of Johto Times, and were very vocal about supporting forums.
You have proven the effort setting up the forum was worth it so far! Thank you :)
Enter Chat Servers, while chatrooms always coexisted with forums, Chat Servers like Discord took the step of applying the segmentation feature of sub-forums as channels to the chatroom live-load environment. This means that people join a community and immediately are given context for what content is encouraged and where to go to discuss it, but under the implicit understanding that the other members of the community will be responsive to questions here and now, and that they won't get pushback from asking questions that have been asked before. Now with the Threads features, these conversations can be forked off temporarily out of the main channel as ephemeral venues for discussion without cross-talk while still being publicly available unlike a DM. This solved one of the main downsides to the live-load chatrooms for information dense subjectmatter.
Speaking of information-dense subject matter, let's not forget that other online community repository of knowledge and sometimes community the wiki. The wiki went the other direction from the forum, saying let's skip the communication context and go straight to the information exchange, development, and repository. Why bring up the wiki? Well it feeds into something I sense on the horizon.
Looking to fill my own needs, and in a context I know many many people share, I have a special interest group that needs a platform for periodic live interaction, persistent asynchronous conversation, and condensing and cataloging reference information. I have found some tools like Discourse, as well as Node BB, that have chat features built in, but frankly hide them away as secondary options. In navigating the Node BB Community forum itself there was not a chat to be found, what does that say?
What am I getting at? All these community tools are at their root social technologies, the software layer is just an enabler. The technology is the way of thinking about how to communicate, the social norms supported by the infrastructure, and the user interaction sequence to situate, sort, identify, unveil, and interact with other users and the information they share. Is there an integrated social technology that fully bridges the divide between ephemeral and persistent content in a way that the user can fluidly navigate between them? I think there could be, and we are closer than ever.
Think of this, a man named U seeks knowledge of how to solve a problem. U enters the private space of a group of sage scholars, sitting a well stocked library containing many writings on the subjects of their various expertise, an index of these works lies at a desk by the door, the scholars sit at their tables writing or in rooms in oiveky discussion. What should U do? Should he go straight to a scholar and interupt their work to ask about his problem? Should he review the index of the library to see if his problem has been written about before? Now here comes the perfect thing: an asstistant. The assistant does something unexpected, they ask "please begin writing your question, I will provide you information I think may be relevant and also tell you which scholar has written on similar problems and where to find them". Well, that seems simple enough, I writes out his problem and soon has several manuscripts on hand, names of the most relevant scholars, and room numbers where they might be found discussing similar matters.
Is this the ideal fusion of ephemeral and persistent communications? I don't know, but I'd like to find out. Not a chat to that substitutes for a person in conversation, but rather one that notes your intentions and provides direct access to threads, pages, and people who are relevant. Paired with that a text box that can dynamically send both the users writing at any time, and links to the surfaced content, to any of several venues including forum threads, chatrooms, a private notes server, a new public page/wiki, or even a post onto a social platform. One point of entry, many venues, and a dynamic assistant to facilitate search with fewer user interactions to reach the most relevant venue for the purpose of the moment.
What do you think? Could this be where we are heading? And can this be a community platform, or will it inevitably be the way others like Anthropic seem to be steering it with Comet (and Google with Chrome), as a dynamic AI browser? Probably both I'm thinking, but I haven't run into to community platform yet, while the browsers are starting to ramp up quick.
For my White Town band chat, I'm thinking of bunging #phpBB up on my own webspace. At the minute we have a #WhatsApp group but obviously that's yet another Meta product. I think running a lil forum just for the six people in the band will be cool!
Mast Geeks - is this a good or bad idea?
Have you got a better replacement for WhatsApp that isn't #Signal or #Telegram?
I see questions about chat, communication, and forum solutions often enough that I figure I should write a descriptive post of several options to keep around for recycling. Since I don't know your exact needs I will describe three options here. Two options are very modern and has a lot of features and the third is very retro and simple text-based forum software with some cool privacy and federation features.
Delta Chat is a email-based chat app. I can use chatmail servers or email servers. It is end-to-end encrypted. (https://delta.chat/en/). If your correspondents have POP/IMAP/SMTP email accounts they can use DeltaChat.
Delta Chat supports group chats and in-chat apps that you can create. It also now supports audio/video calls however they require using a link-based service.
If you want video and audio calls through your own XMPP server, or just private chat, XMPP is the way to go. Movim is a very mature server application for managing a social and chat network based on XMPP protocol. (https://movim.eu/) Movim allows you to federate with other servers similar to how Mastodon servers federate, and it has more features not available in Mastodon, including video conferencing.
Movim has chat, blogs, chat rooms, and even screen sharing support.
If you want a public readable text-based forum without video or audio calls then Rocksolid Light is an option.
Rocksolid Light is a NNTP server with a web forum front end: https://novabbs.org. You can run a private or public node, and even a private or public federated network.
Rocksolid Light has several themes included in the distribution. Here is the same server software running with a very different front end theme: https://news.octade.net (username: 'guest', password is 'guest123' reversed)
You don't have to federate your Rocksolid Light server, but it you want you can federate it. If you federate it, you can send encrypted BBS mail messages between users on different domains. You can also compose encrypted PGP/Mime messages in a newsreader and post them encrypted to a newsgroup for that purpose, so your encryption keys don't have to reside on the server.
The bonus with NNTP is that users can read and post using a dedicated newsreader client that is threaded and has filtering and very compact message threading. You can also download all new messages at once and then read them and write the replies while offline.
Movim is a very highly developed option that includes everything including the kitchen sink, so if you want to grow into audio and video conferencing and federate blogs, it is a superior option. Movim has a very modern interface compared to Rocksolid Light. The advantage of Rocksolid Light is its old-timey simplicity for text-based discussion threads.
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