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> "I tried all of the great tools that were around at the time—WordPress, Blogger—and obviously all the specialized tools—Flickr for photos and YouTube for vide

by buro9 13y ago

> "I tried all of the great tools that were around at the time—WordPress, Blogger—and obviously all the specialized tools—Flickr for photos and YouTube for videos—and I kept falling down. I was perfectly happy with all these tools but at the same time, constantly frustrated by the limitations imposed by all of them." That is the biggest driving force behind the project I'm working on http://microco.sm/ http://microco.sm/ The limitations of the software that powers forums and communities crushes me. I feel that communities are incredible, have so much potential, and that they have the ability to be more than the sum of their members, to create so much magic through serendipity, and when the tools communities use get in the way of this... then I feel a deep sense of loss over what should have been but isn't, the wasted potential. It is such a profound and deep feeling, and one that resonates so much with the users of communities I've spoken to that users of forums funded our seed round, that users are supporting us as we build it, and that we felt that we had to quit our jobs and work on this... this needs to exist. The constraints today feel like chains, and the desire to break those and free the potential is frequently overwhelming. It creates a really powerful driving force to bring this into existence and do it justice, to free the potential of a community.

kfk 13y ago
I like the idea of working out a better forum experience, but your page does not really explain where and why you are different. Maybe you should include a section for this somewhere.
- buro9 13y ago
  That page is out-of-date and we're re-writing it. We actually launched 2 weeks ago, got a load of feedback and active users, and are currently re-prioritising in the light of all that feedback. The biggest difference is that within a forum, instead of just "posts in threads", a whole slew of things can exist and are properly structured... events, classifieds, galleries, polls, Q&A, wiki pages, articles, reviews. No-one has to adapt a thread to be an event as an event type exists with time, place, attendees, etc. Imagine the first 80% of common functionality of a meetup.com page or eventbrite page and imagine that inside a forum and that a conversation about it can also exist. Then imagine the same for ebay adverts, magazine reviews, long-form articles, wiki-pages, surveys, etc. And none of that stuff is global, it's not outside of the forum but on the same site, it's deep within the forums, right there beside the "posts in threads". Instead of a community fragmenting and externalising themselves across the web, or struggling to fit everything into a threaded conversation... every tool a community needs gets surfaced within a forum... and even sub-forums. Then imagine that instead of site admins and technical people determining which sites exist and the structure of them, that the users themselves get to define it. They can create their own sites, and their own spaces within existing sites. The simplest way to explain this today would be sub-reddits, but what if creating a whole new reddit.com was also available... so that the strength of identity of a community could be fully realised. Basically, imagine forums that could be created in seconds, and have all of the ways in which communities and sub-communities communicate and transact dealt with in the one place. Instead of ebay or meetup.com trying to build a community around their classifieds or events... imagine instead bringing the additional functionality that communities require and embedding it deep within the place that the community already hangout.
  - arkitaip 13y ago
    What are your thoughts on Discourse? They are also aiming to change the discussion board space.
    - buro9 13y ago
      On Discourse... it is always hard to tell in the early days where a project might go, and what the pivots may be. We all have to start somewhere and we are judged on what we put out today more than where we are aiming for tomorrow. I don't want to make the mistake of judging them by their current position or their near-term roadmap. From what I've seen from the project so far (and of course I take an interest) they are aiming at a different solution for a different set of problems and potential market than we are. I feel that viewing us as competitors is to view the stagnation of discussion boards as a generalised problem. Actually the market is so vast that the problem sets we are both aiming to solve differ. I believe both approaches will be successful in much the same way that the blogging community have made both Wordpress and Tumblr successful for the different approaches to blogging. The market being so huge that even if we both have massive success (and my definition of that is huge) we will still barely have dented it. Would Discourse work for the set of problems I feel we are attacking? No. But the market is so huge that for many people their problems are solved better by Discourse than what we're doing and vice versa. So I personally think it's great that there are more people working in this space helping to make better forums for everyone. Perhaps in the future we'll converge on the same solution, in which case... great times, we'll both have a sparring partner and a good fight on our hands to spur us on, in the mean time my thought is that they are a partner in the fight against a plague of bad forum software.
anoncow 13y ago
Like stackexchange's area51 without the voting. Do you allow users to add custom code?
- buro9 13y ago
  We're hosted by default, and give a lot of customisation options, but if you find yourself constrained by them we've open-sourced our front-end (Django - https://github.com/microcosm-cc/microweb https://github.com/microcosm-cc/microweb ) and the whole site and full functionality is through an API ( http://microcosm-cc.github.io/ http://microcosm-cc.github.io/ )... so you can deploy your own front-end, delete anything you don't want, and add anything at all that you do want. We're currently keeping the storage layer closed though. We have an open and ongoing debate about whether to open that in future. We want to do a lot of things that improve the user experience and doing so requires an ever more complex back-end. Things like replying to email notifications putting the reply against the thing you were notified about, or providing interfaces through other protocol (events get surfaced through webcal, all content through IMAP, etc). As it's early we want to get on with building that without someone deploying the backend and freaking when we change the requirements ("you now need to add email gateways, MX records, and your infrastructure diagram now has these added boxes, etc"). When we've done most of that we'll return to whether that should be, or needs to be, open.
  - anoncow 13y ago
    Thanks for the detailed info. All the best!

by buro9 13y ago

kfk 13y ago

I like the idea of working out a better forum experience, but your page does not really explain where and why you are different. Maybe you should include a section for this somewhere.

buro9 13y ago
That page is out-of-date and we're re-writing it. We actually launched 2 weeks ago, got a load of feedback and active users, and are currently re-prioritising in the light of all that feedback. The biggest difference is that within a forum, instead of just "posts in threads", a whole slew of things can exist and are properly structured... events, classifieds, galleries, polls, Q&A, wiki pages, articles, reviews. No-one has to adapt a thread to be an event as an event type exists with time, place, attendees, etc. Imagine the first 80% of common functionality of a meetup.com page or eventbrite page and imagine that inside a forum and that a conversation about it can also exist. Then imagine the same for ebay adverts, magazine reviews, long-form articles, wiki-pages, surveys, etc. And none of that stuff is global, it's not outside of the forum but on the same site, it's deep within the forums, right there beside the "posts in threads". Instead of a community fragmenting and externalising themselves across the web, or struggling to fit everything into a threaded conversation... every tool a community needs gets surfaced within a forum... and even sub-forums. Then imagine that instead of site admins and technical people determining which sites exist and the structure of them, that the users themselves get to define it. They can create their own sites, and their own spaces within existing sites. The simplest way to explain this today would be sub-reddits, but what if creating a whole new reddit.com was also available... so that the strength of identity of a community could be fully realised. Basically, imagine forums that could be created in seconds, and have all of the ways in which communities and sub-communities communicate and transact dealt with in the one place. Instead of ebay or meetup.com trying to build a community around their classifieds or events... imagine instead bringing the additional functionality that communities require and embedding it deep within the place that the community already hangout.
- arkitaip 13y ago
  What are your thoughts on Discourse? They are also aiming to change the discussion board space.
  - buro9 13y ago
    On Discourse... it is always hard to tell in the early days where a project might go, and what the pivots may be. We all have to start somewhere and we are judged on what we put out today more than where we are aiming for tomorrow. I don't want to make the mistake of judging them by their current position or their near-term roadmap. From what I've seen from the project so far (and of course I take an interest) they are aiming at a different solution for a different set of problems and potential market than we are. I feel that viewing us as competitors is to view the stagnation of discussion boards as a generalised problem. Actually the market is so vast that the problem sets we are both aiming to solve differ. I believe both approaches will be successful in much the same way that the blogging community have made both Wordpress and Tumblr successful for the different approaches to blogging. The market being so huge that even if we both have massive success (and my definition of that is huge) we will still barely have dented it. Would Discourse work for the set of problems I feel we are attacking? No. But the market is so huge that for many people their problems are solved better by Discourse than what we're doing and vice versa. So I personally think it's great that there are more people working in this space helping to make better forums for everyone. Perhaps in the future we'll converge on the same solution, in which case... great times, we'll both have a sparring partner and a good fight on our hands to spur us on, in the mean time my thought is that they are a partner in the fight against a plague of bad forum software.

anoncow 13y ago

Like stackexchange's area51 without the voting. Do you allow users to add custom code?

buro9 13y ago
We're hosted by default, and give a lot of customisation options, but if you find yourself constrained by them we've open-sourced our front-end (Django - https://github.com/microcosm-cc/microweb https://github.com/microcosm-cc/microweb ) and the whole site and full functionality is through an API ( http://microcosm-cc.github.io/ http://microcosm-cc.github.io/ )... so you can deploy your own front-end, delete anything you don't want, and add anything at all that you do want. We're currently keeping the storage layer closed though. We have an open and ongoing debate about whether to open that in future. We want to do a lot of things that improve the user experience and doing so requires an ever more complex back-end. Things like replying to email notifications putting the reply against the thing you were notified about, or providing interfaces through other protocol (events get surfaced through webcal, all content through IMAP, etc). As it's early we want to get on with building that without someone deploying the backend and freaking when we change the requirements ("you now need to add email gateways, MX records, and your infrastructure diagram now has these added boxes, etc"). When we've done most of that we'll return to whether that should be, or needs to be, open.
- anoncow 13y ago
  Thanks for the detailed info. All the best!