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.
The last couple of weeks ive been cleaning up old accounts i had still around, but kept quite a few up most notable one of forums I used to frequent many of them dead but not all, and with that I also created new ones. One thing I have noticed is that you really do not need a critical mass for a forum to “function” its fine if there is no post for a day if the discussions you have are valuable.