Julian Lam - Forums over Feeds: End the doomscroll

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https://video.fedihost.co/videos/watch/74c3a992-1396-4d27-a733-3f8fcd003d27

NodeBB: @julian@community.nodebb.org
Mastodon: @julian@activitypub.space

The 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.

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he/him

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.

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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.

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I don’t suppose there’s a readable version? Ok if not.

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Comments in Fediverse@piefed.social

What are forums ??🤔🤔🤔

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OP edited

Forum (nodebb) are quite similar to link aggregators (piefed, lemmy, mbin) But there are slight differences :

  • Category (forum) ≈ community (link aggregator)
  • lemmy, mbin, piefed are link aggregators. That meant we mainly share link in a community and talk about it in comments.
  • on forum, you there are several post in a category. They rarely share link, content. They are more geared to the discussion on a topic and share link
  • The difference is the UI. Julian is the cofounder of nodeBB. See his forum : https://community.nodebb.org
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It’s separate from piefed/lemmy/Mastodon ??

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He lost me at 8:20

Why should I care about seeing everything the whole world has posted about dogs, etc?

I should be able to find everything if I look for it, but not seeing everything by default makes it more of a community vibe.

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Perhaps it’s less “I should be able to see everything anybody has said about dogs” to “I should have the ability to…”

For many on traditional social media it’s an expectation, even if they’re being lied to (they’re only seeing a subset based on language, preference, and a thousand other metrics).

On the fediverse it’s more plainly visible that you’re not getting everything, but that can be a feature, too, not a bug.

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@julian
@fediverse

People always of think of the algorithm as something that delivers content -they don't think about the things it filters out.

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