And Slack/Discord are not good examples. You're just setting yourself up for a world of monetized walled garden hurt long term. Matrix however is pretty great.
But Discourse is just old crap in new clothes. It reminds me of badly coded php forums of yore. It looks nicer, but without allowing dozens of external js files it just gets you a blank page. And their demo forum clocks in at nearly 5mb for viewing the index! Add to that bullshit like infinite scrolling and I really don't know why I would ever want to use this. We don't need new bloat that replaces old bloat just so someone maybe cleans up the presentation a bit.
I can't quite put my finger on it, but discourse forums always look very cold to me. Like an enterprise feedback aggregation where you're not sure if anyone will reply. It doesn't feel as explorable and cozy as older forums.
Yeah Discourse is great modern forum software in my experience as a user. So much so that I can imagine it helping lead a resurrection of forums, so much more pleasant to use than Facebook Groups (which I refuse to use)
If only. Too many people sadly go for the path of least resistance, which also has a plus side. People on forums are probably more likely to seek them out because they have their own issues with Facebook/Reddit.
You mean like reddit? It's mostly used that way right now (afaict), but I'm missing the expertise and feel of community (I knew everyone I interacted with on the old BBS) that existed before.
Like the article stated joining a community of like minded people brought a feeling and discourse that I don't really get on modern commercially hosted platforms that offer a "one size fits all" solution.
It's recognisably a forum, but works great on small screen devices and includes richer functionality such as events within forums (logically forums are more equivalent to folders that can contain differently structured things, so not just conversations but events as well for example).
I'm still tempted to work on it at times (hasn't been updated in many years) but for that to be a motivation I'd want to believe that others would run instances too and it would grow as a self-hosted multi-tenant option.
It's extraordinarily cheap to run, far less maintenance than any other forum platform I've ever operated.
Seems like Xenforo and Discourse are the most popular/modern forum software, based on what i've seen on the few forums I still visit regularly.
Discourse is interesting, it allows you to view threads by category, or by a feed where the most recent discussions appear first. Both have social media like features such as status updates and posting on peoples profiles.
Platform as in software-that-you-install-somewhere (in that case: Discourse seems plenty modern for me) or platform as in forum-as-a-service that will most probably end up with a dubious monetization scheme ?
