Julian Lam - Forums over Feeds: End the doomscroll

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.

Julian Lam - Forums over Feeds: End the doomscroll

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 ...

FediHost (video.fedihost.co)

What are forums ??

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

It's separate from piefed/lemmy/Mastodon ??

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.

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.