NodeBB: @julian@community.nodebb.org
Mastodon: @julian@activitypub.spaceThe co-founder of NodeBB, an open-source community forum platform with built-in ActivityPub support, connecting traditional forums to the social web, makes the case for bringing forums back.
Corporate feeds are optimized to keep you scrolling past what you actually came for; Fediverse feeds avoid the manipulation but still dump everything into a single unstructured stream. Forums, with their categories, persistence, and searchability, are the missing third space, and NodeBB’s ActivityPub integration lets a forum curate content from across the Fediverse by hashtag while participating in the wider social web. A pitch for municipal governments, libraries, and interest communities to claim their own digital town halls instead of shouting into someone else’s feed.
I miss old Usenet forums. They actually worked better because they had the concept of, you’ve already seen this message, you don’t have to read it again. And so you could go back and actually have longer conversations over time because you weren’t constantly trying to figure out what to read next. Some of the forums I’ve used I’m trying to do this however they don’t do it nearly as well because it’s more like you’ve read this far up in this page and so if you start reading and then use and there are multiple posts and you run out of time you eventually reach quite where you’ve closed a tab and when you come back it assumes you’ve read things you haven’t.