Looks like a great option, but so is Discourse. What I’m looking for is a way for end users to subscribe and follow irrespective of platform.
tedcurran
Neat. But it’s not pre social media. Social media has been around since the 1980s.
That’s why I alternately call it the “platform web” in which social media stopped running on open and interoperable protocols and started being walled gardens on commercial platforms.
And to your other point - it shouldn’t be solely up to forum admins to opt-in to the Fediverse, end users should be able to subscribe to the forums they belong to with Fedi-powered tools.
The Fediverse could and should be the place where all those things can converge but I’m pointing out that it currently is failing to be that.
Not a stupid question, but I should clarify that I’m approaching this as a reader, not an admin. I’m trying to find a reading solution that encompasses forums running on Discourse, NodeBB, and whatever else older platforms might still have thriving communities around topics I’m interested in.
I found the DiscourseHub app that lets you browse and subscribe to a wide cross section of communities powered by Discourse, but no NodeBB or others. The solution I’m envisioning would be like that but agnostic of platforms.
Real interoperability should allow the publisher (them) to set the level of access (public/private) to their content AND THEN the end user (you and me) to choose the kind of client experience we use to consume that content so we can customize the user experience to our needs. That’s how email and websites work. If a forum software exposed its posts and comments to the open web or RSS (or even just to logged in users), anyone should be able to open that content with the browser or app of their choice. Commercial social platforms have distorted this very basic relationship between publishers and users but we can never forget that is the way it should be.
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?