> We're heading toward smaller communities with 1000 max member forums, about narrow topics, hosted by regular people and not startups. We had this, but those

> We're heading toward smaller communities with 1000 max member forums, about narrow topics, hosted by regular people and not startups. We had this, but those days are gone. Forums used to reign supreme but was killed by a small number of centralized players. Due to the power of the network effect, I don’t see us going back to stand-alone forums anymore, unfortunately. I am skeptical about a federated system of individually managed instances due to the fact that all it takes is some minor inactivity/inaction on the part of the operator to render the service down for the count. I would love to be proved wrong on this.