7 ms·

Actually that makes a lot of sense, it's not that we need to have RSS replace Facebook, we need a resurgance of forums to take back from Facebook. Perhaps if f

by icc97 9y ago

Actually that makes a lot of sense, it's not that we need to have RSS replace Facebook, we need a resurgance of forums to take back from Facebook. Perhaps if forums could talk to each other you'd have an experience more like mastodon, but in concepts that more people understand. Something like an open source Stack Exchange network. So you can log-in to one of them but then easily create an account using the credentials of the original forum that you signed in from. Edit: I know discourse [0] is kind of working along these lines, but I don't think they're designed to have activity between forums. Perhaps it could just be called 'Friend Forums'. [0]: https://www.discourse.org/ https://www.discourse.org/

freehunter 9y ago
Sounds like subreddits.
- ElCapitanMarkla 9y ago
  I was reading something the other day about how reddit has killed the community feel of forums. And thinking about it I agree, I can remember pre reddit I used to be reasonably active on a few forums, made friends etc. Reddit interactions feel a lot more ephemeral if that’s the right word.
  - klokoman 9y ago
    Because there aren't avatars and signatures. Those are essential to recognize users and also find out what they're about (signatures with links to other sites helped everyone). Also even a little personalization will be an incentive to invest a little more time in the community.
    - mynewtb 9y ago
      Also the concept of voting and strictly time-based decaying.
      - always_good 9y ago
        Yeah, without bumping threads on new posts, there's almost no reason to even comment on older topics on HN/Reddit. If it's not on the first two pages, nobody is going to see it. Even worse, the only person who might see it is the one person you responded to since it's in the profile comment feed, and a back-and-forth isn't very interesting. This makes forums much different where each new reply bumps the topic into the eyes of any number of people who are online. The upstream is wrong. Avatars and (ugh) signatures don't make a forum. Being able to converse over time is what does it. That's how you get to know regulars beyond spotting their one-off posts per submission.
        freehunter 9y ago
        Yeah for sure, and even here on HN. I don't reply to comments older than a few days because the only one who will see them is the person I'm replying to. And if my comment is a correction or a clarification, the person I'm responding to may not take it well, so my comment hits 0 or even negative numbers, without the possibility of the general population correcting that (then again, without the risk of them further correcting me if I'm wrong). It's just not worth it.
        KajMagnus 9y ago
        Here's a Reddit & HN like discussion system (I'm developing it) that mitigates? (solves?) the problem with Reddit & HN that [only the one you reply to see your comment]: https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-3-things https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-... Because: 1) when you post a comment, the topic bumps to the top of the topic list. Like a normal forum. 2) inside the topic, people quickly find the recent comments, via the sidebar (as shown in the video "Finding new comments"). (B.t.w. agree that Reddit & HN feel ephemeral. I remember maybe 2 usernames here at HN, and 2 at Reddit, although having spent a lot more time here, than what I've done at Discoure's forum — nevertheless I remember many more people over at Discourse.)
        icc97 9y ago
        Stack Overflow has the 'active' sorting. This is similar to bumping a topic with any activity to the top. This is the default as opposed to new. The mentions there work nicely too, I never get swamped with inbox messages, you can only mention one person in a comment, so there's no @channel nonsense as with Slack.
    - oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
      There is 'flair' which is essentially a signature. And people get creative with usernames to replicate avatars.
      - magduf 9y ago
        Not so much. The "flair" I've seen is very, very limited (so a bunch of people will end up with the exact same ones; there might only be a handful of choices). And part of the usefulness of Reddit is having the same user account across the entire site, so you don't have to separately log into a dozen different forums about different topics. A creative username for a car-related subreddit is going to be pretty useless when you browse over to some subreddit about programming, where no one cares about your obsession with Skylines or whatever. Finally, that stuff isn't really visual the way iconic avatars are, where someone has some small picture for their user account.
        oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
        Most of the subreddits I frequent allow you to choose freeform flair, and it's specific to each subreddit. Sure, though, it's limited in length and it's more closely analogous to a signature than an avatar.
        magduf 9y ago
        Yeah, that was part of my point. That's not an avatar, it's just like a signature like you said.
        petepete 9y ago
        There are custom text flairs available on some subreddits (for, say, camera models in r/photography) as well as icons (the club badges in r/soccer). It's quite flexible. Reddit now has profile images too but they are only displayed there.
    - dredmorbius 9y ago
      I think you're right on avatars. Goofy as they are, they seem to matter. It somewhat hurts HN as well, IMO.
      - icc97 9y ago
        Even Facebook allows avatars. The ability to express yourself in all it's unprofessional ways is important. It's a way to show you're not Facebook. Each topic is built up from the colours of the people that participate there. Individual expression is allowed. Then it's just up to the forum owners to decide what crosses the line.
        dredmorbius 9y ago
        Yes, there's that. But I'm referring to the visual connection and neurological wiring. There's something about label + picture that transcends just one or the other. I've developed my own set of, ugh, "collateral" -- avatar, icon, hero -- which seem to work well across several sites. I find the anchoring works pretty well. And see the same for others I follow, again, both over time and sites. Mostly: G+, Ello, Twitter, Mastodon. Reddit, HN, and Metafilter would be exceptions.
  - john_minsk 9y ago
    I feel you. But my 2 cents on this:we just got old, lazy and wise...
  - JackFr 9y ago
    sigh ...newsgroups... I remember when I knew everyone on rec.sports.basketball.college and then the damn web came along, and everyone was on the internet.
    - hollerith 9y ago
      I read newsgroups a lot (and posted some) not before the web was born, but certainly back when the web had only hundreds or thousands of users whereas newgroups had millions. I used to miss some things about newsgroups. For years, I missed the simplicity with which I could make a local copy of a news article for offline use -- something the web was always pretty bad at doing in such a way that I could count on being able to read the article while offline. But eventually I noticed that I almost never read those local copies (even though 25 years later they still exist on my current local machine and being plain text are still easy to read in isolation). If something on a web page does not register as interesting right away, but only after I've gone on to the next web page, the page after that, then the page after that, I can with .999 reliability go back to the web page that I've slowly come to consider interesting. (In other words, I can use the browser's history menu or history page to return to the page that was current 3 pages ago -- or 5 pages ago or whatever.) Going back to the news article I was reading 3 articles ago on the other hand was much less reliable. I learned how to use the arrow keys combined with the "tree view" in trn to get the reliability of the operation "go back 3 articles" up to something like .6, and going back one article could be done (with the = key in trn IIRC) with a single keystroke with a reliability of about .85, but if the article I wanted to go back to had fallen off an edge of the "tree view" (which consisted of no more than about 35 columns and 16 lines) then I would just give up on ever getting another look at the article. Of course this deficiency of newsgroups could've been fixed simply by someone's writing another newsreader, followed by my switching to it, but there were other things about newsgroups not so easily fixed that discouraged reflection and contemplation: for example, chances were about .07 that that the parent or any particular child (i.e., reply to) the article one was looking at was missing from one's news server. Often this had a predictable reason (i.e., many news servers culled articles over 30 days old, and the parent is probably older than that) but it was not rare for it to happen for no discernible reason. In other words, for me, a reflective reader, i.e., a reader who often wants to revisits things he read 10 minutes ago or a few hours ago that at the time of the initial reading I did not consider interesting and consequently did not bother to bookmark or make a local copy of (the rough newsgroup analog to the making a bookmark to a web page), the web or at least the web of the 1990s was a significant improvement over newsgroups.
  - Mononokay 9y ago
    Just pick smaller subreddits. Of course if you stick to one with half a million users, you're not going to have a good time - the Facebookization of the site has been extremely evident in recent years, but smaller subs are still more or less independent forums. Pick a few niches and make a new account that only subscribes to small subreddits about them; it really does put a community feel to it all.
  - NeoBasilisk 9y ago
    Subreddits also have a strong tendency to become echo chambers due to how Reddit works. Controversial opinions are downvoted into oblivion and fewer people see them. Traditional message boards have none of that.
- icc97 9y ago
  The reddit model is more centralised than I'd imagined. Each forum could still have their own domain and installation. Ideally it would be in some way compatible to existing forums. Perhaps better integration of forums via RSS. One thing regular forums tend to still have is RSS feeds built in. They can also be a nice go between of email and online users (although as has been said many times, email an be the death of forums).
astura 9y ago
Isn't this basically Reddit?
- oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
  I think they were raising the possibility of having multiple reedits, each owned by a separate entity, yet still compatible. Like we have multiple email providers, for example.
  - herbst 9y ago
    Which kind of is the concept of reddit. What am I missing?
    - petepete 9y ago
      The each owned by separate entity bit. I think the earlier posters meant that if (somehow) a Reddit-like service was federated and anyone could set up their own server that hosted its own subreddits while sharing auth, it would be a very interesting product.
  - confounded 9y ago
    What would compatible mean? Why is compatability needed?
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Reddit sucks for high-quality, long-lived discussions. Of all places, G+ does reasonably well at this, with a suitably selective group. Mailing lists / usenet are still probably the pinacle.
exergy 9y ago
I do not get discourse. I've only ever come across it on Jeff's own blog, but it seems no different to Disqus. And both don't load with uMatrix without manually activating them. I don't want more Javascript in my life. I want more static forum posts.
- icc97 9y ago
  Disqus is a centralised data harvester and no better than Facebook as far as I can tell. Discourse is just another forum software, but it's open source and you can setup your own. Jeff's taken some of the ideas from StackOverflow and tried to apply them to forums. To be honest I think most people are happy with regular forums, they work as you expect and there aren't many rules to learn. I've come across Discourse forums a couple of times. Plotly charts use Discourse for their forum [0]. They work well, but as you say Discourse tried to rebrand the forum and so introduces a layer that most people just won't get. [0]: https://community.plot.ly/ https://community.plot.ly/
- herbst 9y ago
  Except both have a comment functionality there is nothing they really compare to each other.
JacobJans 9y ago
I run a popular forum in a certain niche -- and have played around with discourse as an alternative. It doesn't seem to solve any important issues with growing a community. Additionally, it is rather difficult to customize, making it even harder to solve problems specific to my community. I am not a professional coder, but I can hack pretty much anything I need into my php based forum. Though, maybe discourse has gotten better since I tried it a couple of years ago.
- herbst 9y ago
  To be fair as Ruby/Rails developer I say the same about discourse VS everything else. It follows a lot of rails standards which makes it incredible easy to hack. While phpbb and friends are hacks in itself to begin with.
  - JacobJans 9y ago
    I think that gets to the core of it -- It follows standards that you need to know if you want to be able to easily hack it. Which means learning standards. Ruby On Rails is really powerful, but it is not easy to start hacking on without a fair amount of base knowledge. In addition, discourse uses a lot of javascript, which makes it even more difficult to modify. The barrier to entry, in terms of creating a custom template, is quite high. You need to learn quite a few things before getting started. On the other hand, hacking something like a Wordpress template takes almost zero knowledge. You can just start poking at things. The lack of a relatively simple templating system is a big drawback in Discourse. Especially if you're not a rails developer, and you're running a community forum as a hobby. I know how to program because of software such as phpbb and Wordpress, which are pretty much hacked together. Maybe because they're hacks, they have easier entry points. I do think the Discourse people have different goals than I'm talking about here, however. If their goal was to make software that was easy to modify, hack, and deploy, they would have made different choices.
    - icc97 9y ago
      Yeah when it's a pristine beautifully structured code base people are more cautious about weighing in because they can't code as well. When it all looks like shit no-one worries about hacking their own. WordPress has both it's own forum bbPress and it's social network buddyPress. As far as a hackable system for everyone it's an attractive start. WP is based around the concept of everyone installing their own. Their 5-minute install is still the gold standard as far as I'm concerned. So as controversial as it is on HN I think the idea of using PHP is still a sound one. But as a geek I'd much rather go down the Python route in some kind of homage to the foundation of reddit. Python is a great language for beginners to learn and it's designed for them. Plus it's still a very relevant skill to learn.
always_good 9y ago
That's what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard was where your username worked across all forums. https://www.proboards.com/ https://www.proboards.com/ is still around but doesn't have global accounts as far as I can remember. I'm not convinced there's much payoff waiting for you if you were to create such a system. I think that Reddit's format is so popular because you get to just scroll a stream of provocative/vetted headlines. Even the comments are geared in a way where you're scrolling a stream of one-off provocative comments. There is no long form conversation over time. Everything is ephemeral. By the way, kind of interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard#Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard#Technology
CM30 9y ago
This is basically the setup I've been discussing in my articles about a decentralised Reddit alternative. A system where forums are all hosted independently, but can share login data, reputation data, post history, etc. https://artplusmarketing.com/discussing-a-decentralised-reddit-alternative-e8a845e96fb2 https://artplusmarketing.com/discussing-a-decentralised-redd... It would hopefully avert the issue Reddit like sites have where different groups want to control what others can say on the platform, by taking control out of the hands of a large corporation.
- KajMagnus 9y ago
  I actually mostly appreciate the moderation/censorship Reddit does nowadays. E.g. banning subreddits like "beating cr-ppl-s" and "r-p-ng w-men". Isn't the world better of, when it's harder for people to give advice about, and encourage, those things? Anyway, you wrote (in the blog): "independently hosted forums" — I like that, for various reasons. Actually, I might slightly have built a Reddit alternative minus single-sign-on. Here's an a bit Reddit like discussion: https://www.talkyard.io/forum/-61859/forum-software-for-the-future https://www.talkyard.io/forum/-61859/forum-software-for-the-... And one can create per site sub communities, a bit like subreddits. Actually, there are improvements over Reddit: https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-3-things https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-... . Someone is actually emailing with me about migrating their subreddits from Reddit to a Talkyard community at their own domain. You wrote: "It would be a very complicated forum aggregator with a ton of features necessary to create the combined community side like on Reddit or its alternatives." — I agree. And it'd also be lovely with a mobile phone app, that could connect to all these disparate communities. So one didn't need to type the address in the mobile phone browser. Instead one just clicked in a list of recently visited communities. And it showed notifications too. ... A bit like mobile Facebook and Reddit, but connected to 999 decentralized communities. I've been thinking a bit about building this mobile app, and forum aggregator / search engine. And initially make it work with Discourse (https://www.discourse.org https://www.discourse.org), Flarum (http://flarum.org http://flarum.org) and Talkyard (https://www.talkyard.io https://www.talkyard.io).
- icc97 9y ago
  Excellent post, pretty much exactly what I was thinking of > Of course, it still raises questions about how it’d be financed or supported. No investor would back a service that couldn’t be controlled at all and could lose most of its userbase overnight. I think the WordPress/WooCommerce model works for this. So you handle forum set up for businesses, or have paid for plugins. You can also still have a centralised system like basically reddit/wordpress.com , but allow subdomains just to be redirected to someones own domain (all for a minor cost).
KajMagnus 9y ago
1. Open source StackExchange :- ) There's Talkyard, which looks a bit like StackExchange. ... Minus the single-sign-on part though. I'm developing it. Here's an example StackExchange discussion, copied to Talkyard: (CC-By-SA license) https://insightful.demo.talkyard.io/-7/how-do-i-get-myself-out-of-bed-in-the-morning https://insightful.demo.talkyard.io/-7/how-do-i-get-myself-o... 2. Single sign-on, and (as you wrote), "using the credentials of the original forum": What about using Scuttlebut's identities? Everyone has his/her own ed25519 key pair. "The public key is used as the identifier", see: http://scuttlebot.io/more/protocols/secure-scuttlebutt.html http://scuttlebot.io/more/protocols/secure-scuttlebutt.html. These can be created in a decentralized manner. The keys are really long, but maybe, in a specific forum, one wouldn't need to show the whole key. One could instead show a forum-local-@username + the shortest unique key prefix (unique in that forum).
- jen729w 9y ago
  And now that guy on the fishing charter can’t use it because he has no idea what that means.
  - KajMagnus 9y ago
    Actually when one installs Scuttlebutt, one doesn't need to know about ed25519 key pairs. Instead one just downloads the software, picks a username and starts reading & posting. (As far as i remember.) The user interface makes everything fairly simple. Distributed community discussion/chat clients, with universal single-sign-on, could maybe be equally simple? Two tricky tech things could be 1) how to share one's key, between all one's devices. And 2) how can all one's browser tabs, and discussion apps, get access to the key, once it's installed on localhost? without being able to steal the private key. (If one is a Scuttlebut developer, though, then one might need to know about ed25519 identities.)
  - ILikeConemowk 9y ago
    He learned to sail and fish, he can learn to use a key pair. I despise cynics who in the process of underestimating others crash the party, our party. If the man wants his damn forum back give him his forum, in as many possible flavours and sizes as we possibly can. Then let him deliverate, hopefully learn and ultimately adapt.

by icc97 9y ago

freehunter 9y ago

Sounds like subreddits.

ElCapitanMarkla 9y ago
I was reading something the other day about how reddit has killed the community feel of forums. And thinking about it I agree, I can remember pre reddit I used to be reasonably active on a few forums, made friends etc. Reddit interactions feel a lot more ephemeral if that’s the right word.
- klokoman 9y ago
  Because there aren't avatars and signatures. Those are essential to recognize users and also find out what they're about (signatures with links to other sites helped everyone). Also even a little personalization will be an incentive to invest a little more time in the community.
  - mynewtb 9y ago
    Also the concept of voting and strictly time-based decaying.
    - always_good 9y ago
      Yeah, without bumping threads on new posts, there's almost no reason to even comment on older topics on HN/Reddit. If it's not on the first two pages, nobody is going to see it. Even worse, the only person who might see it is the one person you responded to since it's in the profile comment feed, and a back-and-forth isn't very interesting. This makes forums much different where each new reply bumps the topic into the eyes of any number of people who are online. The upstream is wrong. Avatars and (ugh) signatures don't make a forum. Being able to converse over time is what does it. That's how you get to know regulars beyond spotting their one-off posts per submission.
      - freehunter 9y ago
        Yeah for sure, and even here on HN. I don't reply to comments older than a few days because the only one who will see them is the person I'm replying to. And if my comment is a correction or a clarification, the person I'm responding to may not take it well, so my comment hits 0 or even negative numbers, without the possibility of the general population correcting that (then again, without the risk of them further correcting me if I'm wrong). It's just not worth it.
        KajMagnus 9y ago
        Here's a Reddit & HN like discussion system (I'm developing it) that mitigates? (solves?) the problem with Reddit & HN that [only the one you reply to see your comment]: https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-3-things https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-... Because: 1) when you post a comment, the topic bumps to the top of the topic list. Like a normal forum. 2) inside the topic, people quickly find the recent comments, via the sidebar (as shown in the video "Finding new comments"). (B.t.w. agree that Reddit & HN feel ephemeral. I remember maybe 2 usernames here at HN, and 2 at Reddit, although having spent a lot more time here, than what I've done at Discoure's forum — nevertheless I remember many more people over at Discourse.)
      - icc97 9y ago
        Stack Overflow has the 'active' sorting. This is similar to bumping a topic with any activity to the top. This is the default as opposed to new. The mentions there work nicely too, I never get swamped with inbox messages, you can only mention one person in a comment, so there's no @channel nonsense as with Slack.
  - oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
    There is 'flair' which is essentially a signature. And people get creative with usernames to replicate avatars.
    - magduf 9y ago
      Not so much. The "flair" I've seen is very, very limited (so a bunch of people will end up with the exact same ones; there might only be a handful of choices). And part of the usefulness of Reddit is having the same user account across the entire site, so you don't have to separately log into a dozen different forums about different topics. A creative username for a car-related subreddit is going to be pretty useless when you browse over to some subreddit about programming, where no one cares about your obsession with Skylines or whatever. Finally, that stuff isn't really visual the way iconic avatars are, where someone has some small picture for their user account.
      - oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
        Most of the subreddits I frequent allow you to choose freeform flair, and it's specific to each subreddit. Sure, though, it's limited in length and it's more closely analogous to a signature than an avatar.
        magduf 9y ago
        Yeah, that was part of my point. That's not an avatar, it's just like a signature like you said.
      - petepete 9y ago
        There are custom text flairs available on some subreddits (for, say, camera models in r/photography) as well as icons (the club badges in r/soccer). It's quite flexible. Reddit now has profile images too but they are only displayed there.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    I think you're right on avatars. Goofy as they are, they seem to matter. It somewhat hurts HN as well, IMO.
    - icc97 9y ago
      Even Facebook allows avatars. The ability to express yourself in all it's unprofessional ways is important. It's a way to show you're not Facebook. Each topic is built up from the colours of the people that participate there. Individual expression is allowed. Then it's just up to the forum owners to decide what crosses the line.
      - dredmorbius 9y ago
        Yes, there's that. But I'm referring to the visual connection and neurological wiring. There's something about label + picture that transcends just one or the other. I've developed my own set of, ugh, "collateral" -- avatar, icon, hero -- which seem to work well across several sites. I find the anchoring works pretty well. And see the same for others I follow, again, both over time and sites. Mostly: G+, Ello, Twitter, Mastodon. Reddit, HN, and Metafilter would be exceptions.
- john_minsk 9y ago
  I feel you. But my 2 cents on this:we just got old, lazy and wise...
- JackFr 9y ago
  sigh ...newsgroups... I remember when I knew everyone on rec.sports.basketball.college and then the damn web came along, and everyone was on the internet.
  - hollerith 9y ago
    I read newsgroups a lot (and posted some) not before the web was born, but certainly back when the web had only hundreds or thousands of users whereas newgroups had millions. I used to miss some things about newsgroups. For years, I missed the simplicity with which I could make a local copy of a news article for offline use -- something the web was always pretty bad at doing in such a way that I could count on being able to read the article while offline. But eventually I noticed that I almost never read those local copies (even though 25 years later they still exist on my current local machine and being plain text are still easy to read in isolation). If something on a web page does not register as interesting right away, but only after I've gone on to the next web page, the page after that, then the page after that, I can with .999 reliability go back to the web page that I've slowly come to consider interesting. (In other words, I can use the browser's history menu or history page to return to the page that was current 3 pages ago -- or 5 pages ago or whatever.) Going back to the news article I was reading 3 articles ago on the other hand was much less reliable. I learned how to use the arrow keys combined with the "tree view" in trn to get the reliability of the operation "go back 3 articles" up to something like .6, and going back one article could be done (with the = key in trn IIRC) with a single keystroke with a reliability of about .85, but if the article I wanted to go back to had fallen off an edge of the "tree view" (which consisted of no more than about 35 columns and 16 lines) then I would just give up on ever getting another look at the article. Of course this deficiency of newsgroups could've been fixed simply by someone's writing another newsreader, followed by my switching to it, but there were other things about newsgroups not so easily fixed that discouraged reflection and contemplation: for example, chances were about .07 that that the parent or any particular child (i.e., reply to) the article one was looking at was missing from one's news server. Often this had a predictable reason (i.e., many news servers culled articles over 30 days old, and the parent is probably older than that) but it was not rare for it to happen for no discernible reason. In other words, for me, a reflective reader, i.e., a reader who often wants to revisits things he read 10 minutes ago or a few hours ago that at the time of the initial reading I did not consider interesting and consequently did not bother to bookmark or make a local copy of (the rough newsgroup analog to the making a bookmark to a web page), the web or at least the web of the 1990s was a significant improvement over newsgroups.
- Mononokay 9y ago
  Just pick smaller subreddits. Of course if you stick to one with half a million users, you're not going to have a good time - the Facebookization of the site has been extremely evident in recent years, but smaller subs are still more or less independent forums. Pick a few niches and make a new account that only subscribes to small subreddits about them; it really does put a community feel to it all.
- NeoBasilisk 9y ago
  Subreddits also have a strong tendency to become echo chambers due to how Reddit works. Controversial opinions are downvoted into oblivion and fewer people see them. Traditional message boards have none of that.
icc97 9y ago
The reddit model is more centralised than I'd imagined. Each forum could still have their own domain and installation. Ideally it would be in some way compatible to existing forums. Perhaps better integration of forums via RSS. One thing regular forums tend to still have is RSS feeds built in. They can also be a nice go between of email and online users (although as has been said many times, email an be the death of forums).

astura 9y ago

Isn't this basically Reddit?

oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
I think they were raising the possibility of having multiple reedits, each owned by a separate entity, yet still compatible. Like we have multiple email providers, for example.
- herbst 9y ago
  Which kind of is the concept of reddit. What am I missing?
  - petepete 9y ago
    The each owned by separate entity bit. I think the earlier posters meant that if (somehow) a Reddit-like service was federated and anyone could set up their own server that hosted its own subreddits while sharing auth, it would be a very interesting product.
- confounded 9y ago
  What would compatible mean? Why is compatability needed?
dredmorbius 9y ago
Reddit sucks for high-quality, long-lived discussions. Of all places, G+ does reasonably well at this, with a suitably selective group. Mailing lists / usenet are still probably the pinacle.

exergy 9y ago

I do not get discourse. I've only ever come across it on Jeff's own blog, but it seems no different to Disqus. And both don't load with uMatrix without manually activating them. I don't want more Javascript in my life. I want more static forum posts.

icc97 9y ago
Disqus is a centralised data harvester and no better than Facebook as far as I can tell. Discourse is just another forum software, but it's open source and you can setup your own. Jeff's taken some of the ideas from StackOverflow and tried to apply them to forums. To be honest I think most people are happy with regular forums, they work as you expect and there aren't many rules to learn. I've come across Discourse forums a couple of times. Plotly charts use Discourse for their forum [0]. They work well, but as you say Discourse tried to rebrand the forum and so introduces a layer that most people just won't get. [0]: https://community.plot.ly/ https://community.plot.ly/
herbst 9y ago
Except both have a comment functionality there is nothing they really compare to each other.

JacobJans 9y ago

I run a popular forum in a certain niche -- and have played around with discourse as an alternative. It doesn't seem to solve any important issues with growing a community. Additionally, it is rather difficult to customize, making it even harder to solve problems specific to my community. I am not a professional coder, but I can hack pretty much anything I need into my php based forum. Though, maybe discourse has gotten better since I tried it a couple of years ago.

herbst 9y ago
To be fair as Ruby/Rails developer I say the same about discourse VS everything else. It follows a lot of rails standards which makes it incredible easy to hack. While phpbb and friends are hacks in itself to begin with.
- JacobJans 9y ago
  I think that gets to the core of it -- It follows standards that you need to know if you want to be able to easily hack it. Which means learning standards. Ruby On Rails is really powerful, but it is not easy to start hacking on without a fair amount of base knowledge. In addition, discourse uses a lot of javascript, which makes it even more difficult to modify. The barrier to entry, in terms of creating a custom template, is quite high. You need to learn quite a few things before getting started. On the other hand, hacking something like a Wordpress template takes almost zero knowledge. You can just start poking at things. The lack of a relatively simple templating system is a big drawback in Discourse. Especially if you're not a rails developer, and you're running a community forum as a hobby. I know how to program because of software such as phpbb and Wordpress, which are pretty much hacked together. Maybe because they're hacks, they have easier entry points. I do think the Discourse people have different goals than I'm talking about here, however. If their goal was to make software that was easy to modify, hack, and deploy, they would have made different choices.
  - icc97 9y ago
    Yeah when it's a pristine beautifully structured code base people are more cautious about weighing in because they can't code as well. When it all looks like shit no-one worries about hacking their own. WordPress has both it's own forum bbPress and it's social network buddyPress. As far as a hackable system for everyone it's an attractive start. WP is based around the concept of everyone installing their own. Their 5-minute install is still the gold standard as far as I'm concerned. So as controversial as it is on HN I think the idea of using PHP is still a sound one. But as a geek I'd much rather go down the Python route in some kind of homage to the foundation of reddit. Python is a great language for beginners to learn and it's designed for them. Plus it's still a very relevant skill to learn.

always_good 9y ago

That's what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard was where your username worked across all forums. https://www.proboards.com/ https://www.proboards.com/ is still around but doesn't have global accounts as far as I can remember. I'm not convinced there's much payoff waiting for you if you were to create such a system. I think that Reddit's format is so popular because you get to just scroll a stream of provocative/vetted headlines. Even the comments are geared in a way where you're scrolling a stream of one-off provocative comments. There is no long form conversation over time. Everything is ephemeral. By the way, kind of interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard#Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard#Technology

CM30 9y ago

This is basically the setup I've been discussing in my articles about a decentralised Reddit alternative. A system where forums are all hosted independently, but can share login data, reputation data, post history, etc. https://artplusmarketing.com/discussing-a-decentralised-reddit-alternative-e8a845e96fb2 https://artplusmarketing.com/discussing-a-decentralised-redd... It would hopefully avert the issue Reddit like sites have where different groups want to control what others can say on the platform, by taking control out of the hands of a large corporation.

KajMagnus 9y ago
I actually mostly appreciate the moderation/censorship Reddit does nowadays. E.g. banning subreddits like "beating cr-ppl-s" and "r-p-ng w-men". Isn't the world better of, when it's harder for people to give advice about, and encourage, those things? Anyway, you wrote (in the blog): "independently hosted forums" — I like that, for various reasons. Actually, I might slightly have built a Reddit alternative minus single-sign-on. Here's an a bit Reddit like discussion: https://www.talkyard.io/forum/-61859/forum-software-for-the-future https://www.talkyard.io/forum/-61859/forum-software-for-the-... And one can create per site sub communities, a bit like subreddits. Actually, there are improvements over Reddit: https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-3-things https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-... . Someone is actually emailing with me about migrating their subreddits from Reddit to a Talkyard community at their own domain. You wrote: "It would be a very complicated forum aggregator with a ton of features necessary to create the combined community side like on Reddit or its alternatives." — I agree. And it'd also be lovely with a mobile phone app, that could connect to all these disparate communities. So one didn't need to type the address in the mobile phone browser. Instead one just clicked in a list of recently visited communities. And it showed notifications too. ... A bit like mobile Facebook and Reddit, but connected to 999 decentralized communities. I've been thinking a bit about building this mobile app, and forum aggregator / search engine. And initially make it work with Discourse (https://www.discourse.org https://www.discourse.org), Flarum (http://flarum.org http://flarum.org) and Talkyard (https://www.talkyard.io https://www.talkyard.io).
icc97 9y ago
Excellent post, pretty much exactly what I was thinking of > Of course, it still raises questions about how it’d be financed or supported. No investor would back a service that couldn’t be controlled at all and could lose most of its userbase overnight. I think the WordPress/WooCommerce model works for this. So you handle forum set up for businesses, or have paid for plugins. You can also still have a centralised system like basically reddit/wordpress.com , but allow subdomains just to be redirected to someones own domain (all for a minor cost).

KajMagnus 9y ago

1. Open source StackExchange :- ) There's Talkyard, which looks a bit like StackExchange. ... Minus the single-sign-on part though. I'm developing it. Here's an example StackExchange discussion, copied to Talkyard: (CC-By-SA license) https://insightful.demo.talkyard.io/-7/how-do-i-get-myself-out-of-bed-in-the-morning https://insightful.demo.talkyard.io/-7/how-do-i-get-myself-o... 2. Single sign-on, and (as you wrote), "using the credentials of the original forum": What about using Scuttlebut's identities? Everyone has his/her own ed25519 key pair. "The public key is used as the identifier", see: http://scuttlebot.io/more/protocols/secure-scuttlebutt.html http://scuttlebot.io/more/protocols/secure-scuttlebutt.html. These can be created in a decentralized manner. The keys are really long, but maybe, in a specific forum, one wouldn't need to show the whole key. One could instead show a forum-local-@username + the shortest unique key prefix (unique in that forum).

jen729w 9y ago
And now that guy on the fishing charter can’t use it because he has no idea what that means.
- KajMagnus 9y ago
  Actually when one installs Scuttlebutt, one doesn't need to know about ed25519 key pairs. Instead one just downloads the software, picks a username and starts reading & posting. (As far as i remember.) The user interface makes everything fairly simple. Distributed community discussion/chat clients, with universal single-sign-on, could maybe be equally simple? Two tricky tech things could be 1) how to share one's key, between all one's devices. And 2) how can all one's browser tabs, and discussion apps, get access to the key, once it's installed on localhost? without being able to steal the private key. (If one is a Scuttlebut developer, though, then one might need to know about ed25519 identities.)
- ILikeConemowk 9y ago
  He learned to sail and fish, he can learn to use a key pair. I despise cynics who in the process of underestimating others crash the party, our party. If the man wants his damn forum back give him his forum, in as many possible flavours and sizes as we possibly can. Then let him deliverate, hopefully learn and ultimately adapt.