Looking back at decentralized conversations before the platform web

#Tapatalk was a dominant app in the pre-social media days when discussions took place on all different forums and message board sites across the internet, not centralized platforms like today. Tapatalk provided a centralized way to subscribe to all those discussions on different servers, post and comment freely, without logging into each forum site directly.

Since then #Reddit became the centralized and dominant place to engage around niche topics, killing that diverse ecosystem of forums. I’d like to see the #Fediverse become and equivalent “central” location for finding and engaging with niche topics while remaining decentralized by its nature.

We still have lots of forums running on open source #Discourse software, but we don’t have an easy way to connect and engage all those communities back into #Lemmy, #ActivityPub, and the #Fediverse to make them findable with the same ease Reddit provides.

What’s the best way to unify the #Fediverse with the existing forum communities that exist outside the platform web?

Maybe check out NodeBB. My recollection is that it’s a federated server software for forums that can interface with at least Mastodon and Piefed (probably Lemmy and Mbin too).

I believe I’ve seen some content from a forum in the past, but it’s tough to tell, as I think they just show up the same as any other threadiverse instance (a post in a community on an instance).

I’m not sure how you’d search for them though…