I remember watching this project as it was getting started. It was a replacement to all those PHP forums, like PHPBB & Simple Machines BB. This claimed to have more modern features. It’s also open-source, and you can self-host or pay them for hosting. (I recommend the latter)
And since we’re on the subject, has Beehaw considered using an old PHP forum, like I mentioned earlier? They’re really basic and quite nice, IMHO.
Yes. Discourse and Forem have been top contenders, but for different reasons. Main points against them both are the lack of federation and ‘forum based’ more than aggregation style based. (Like Reddit and Lemmy formats). Discourse also has a very strict developer contribution requirement.
Developer contribution requirement?
CLA signing is always a redflag for me
Main points against them both are the lack of federation
As far as I know, Discourse now has an ActivityPub plugin that allows it to federate, but I don’t know much about it besides that, or what that would be like to use in practice in comparison to the aggregator styles.
The ActivityPub plugin is very early and has many quirks at the moment. Can’t edit, weird text limit things and I believe it is just a one-way federation?
Ahh, good to know. So pretty much only good as a standalone forum then 🫤
Cheers for the info!
Lack of federation? My understanding was that Beehaw planned to migrate away from Lemmy altogether. Has that changed?
That aspect hasn’t changed, in so much that we want to keep federation aspect of the community. We don’t want to deal with Lemmy, and they don’t want to deal with us. Lemmy ~= federation.
Yes, I see the tension has become worse. I just found and read this beehaw document on the matter.
For what it’s worth, I want to continue to be a part of Beehaw. I really appreciate the value that they stand for.
I created this alternate account and stopped using my Beehaw account because it seemed like they’re departure from Lemmy was imminent. Today, it seems they’re departure is still on the horizon, but not anytime soon. I guess one can only watch and see.
I really hope we end up on something with Lemmy/Fediverse/Activitypub compatibility, e.g. PieFed or Sublinks.
The only reason I can have a good time on Lemmy is because of Voyager, which I use on my phone and computers, and I’m hoping it might be possible to get an app for whatever platform gets chosen (and preferably Voyager!).
I was always an app user for the 15 years I was on Reddit, and using a website for Beehaw/Fediverse stuff would be too far out of my comfort zone 😐
Based on the PieFed developer’s recent comment here on Beehaw, it could be quite promising as an alternative 😄
It would also be an easy transfer for users, since PieFed is compatible with the lemmy subscriptions export file.
i use it to run my forums and it’s significantly better than any experience i’ve had with phpbb. i don’t know how much an activitypub plugin would be actually useful for it, given that that’s basically a niche for a niche, but if all you want is a community forum that gets delineated into different categories and has a fairly robust user-driven tagging system, you could do worse for replacing Lemmy imo
the biggest downside is that it’s not very friendly for low-engineering experience admins, especially if you want it to scale outside of a single computer it’s running on (separating the db from the web traffic, for instance)
PHPBB’s paging system was trash, Discourse’s “infinite scroll” system is only marginally better… from a visual candy point of view; for discoverability, it’s still trash.
Nested threads are a thing since email, and there’s a reason for that. Even Mastodon, a “Twitter-like”, has them. Heck, even Facebook has them (to a degree). The concept could still be improved upon, but going to a non-nested solution would be a serious step back.
