Ethan J. A. SchoonoverI say this as someone running a sizable Discord: We have to move past Discord for community.
2025 let's bring back BLOGS, RSS, and FORUMS
Ringo De Smet@ethanschoonover Discourse then? Or back to Usenet? 😆
@ringods Yep. Discourse would be my first choice right now. I miss old usenet.
: j@fabrica:~/src; 
@ethanschoonover @ringods Plan 9 is attempting a return to Usenet: https://comp.os.plan9.narkive.com/SnexHy94/we-re-alive-again
Raphael@ethanschoonover @ringods I appreciate Discourse existing but I do wish there was an option that felt a bit more painless to host. Feels surprisingly heavy for a forum system (though better than before!)
mhd@ethanschoonover @ringods I think the custom forum used for the D language also can be accessed as a NNTP server, but I've never seen it used anywhere else, probably because you need to set up a server before that, and who knows how to do that anymore? ;) (https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed)
I never could get behind Discourse a lot. It's usable, but I like paging better than endless scrolling, and it loses a bit of the charm of the old table-styled PHP-based forum software (e.g. PhpBB, SMF). Let's not even talk about the backend requirements…
Markus 🤓✨@ringods @ethanschoonover uuuh, I hadn’t heard of Discourse. Will check that out.
Turing Incomplete@ethanschoonover Whenever I see Discord being the main community hub, I conclude that I will not be following said community. I genuinely have no idea how people manage to stay afloat on the sheer volume of messages.
Christian Tietze@ethanschoonover Our forum still runs, so it’s not truly dead abd people seem to grok it :)
Do you believe your Discordians will start blogging?
Maybe something like a community-internal tumblr?
I’d love to help our members empower themselves digitally, but that’s so utopian it seems 😫
@ctietze I think folks have had enough experience with Discord to know its strengths and weaknesses and that when building a new community the messaging around "we're going back to a forum" would land on fertile ground (depending on what community of course).
I'm not against using it for some things, but it's a group knowledge black hole.
The Gym Nerd@ethanschoonover IDK but isn't Matrix offering everything that Discord has... Plus decentralization and a serious encryption?
@TheGymNerd i'm actually in favor of a more forum based model (e.g. discourse). chat (closed or open source) is more transient and harder to search/surface info.
Six Possums In A Trenchcoat@ethanschoonover Literally anything with persistence and external searchability. Even better if it's not on a platform owned by a company.
Kit Muse@ethanschoonover this is something I've been really thinking about. I want to build a community. I want to do it on my own site. But I also know I forget to go look at communities/need email notifications and am not sure the wide adoption is there for either free or paid upgrades. Everybody wants everything in one place.
Just call me Ash@ethanschoonover I'm missing IRC in the list, since that would be the most direct Discord replacement... but hell yes for blogs and RSS.
I've started selfhosting Miniflux recently and it's awesome.
James Baillie@ethanschoonover To start on the "bringing back" could we indeed support the ones that do exist already?
I help run a community owned webforum and if anyone wants a forum space for small projects (especially but not solely in creative, crafts, gaming or academic spaces) we'd be happy to host some more folks & discuss people's needs.
SSFC KDT 💚💙⚽🌹💻🍺✌
Andrew Woods@ssfckdt @ethanschoonover The death of Google Reader was only part of it, and probably the initial domino. Browsers also removed the RSS indicator from the address bar (as part of diminishing the visibility of URLs - to prioritize search). Also, as sites added paywalls and ads, sites minimized RSS content - by typically showing just the opening paragraph; Sometimes only a sentence.
aswack@ssfckdt @ethanschoonover I feel like it’s still been limping along for years? It’s not well known but I’ve been using NewsBlur for a long, long time. Like so many other nearly dead things on the web, it persists in the lore of nerds
@swacknificent @ssfckdt I also still use RSS extensively via both Reeder and DEVONthink primarily. Just want to really continue to promote its resurgence.
@ethanschoonover @ssfckdt yeah, it should be prostheletized! I have vague plans to see if I can put together a session to talk to my coworkers about how they might use RSS to follow professional topics.
Eider@swacknificent @ethanschoonover @ssfckdt
As @awoodsnet wrote earlier, the websites' lack of full support or no support at all is the biggest problem.
Is it an Ad revenue problem? Do articles full downloads do not count towards their analytics?
I use Feeder in android
@aguamielerogpz @swacknificent @ethanschoonover @ssfckdt The problem with RSS from a business aspect is that the RSS feed is outside the browser experience where the ads are. So when people read the article from the feed, their analytics are not being collected. A biz wants the RSS feed to drive users to the site. So the full article gets reduced to an excerpt , in order to incentivize the customer to finish the article on the website. I don’t know how effective that tactic is, though.
@awoodsnet @aguamielerogpz @ethanschoonover @ssfckdt ultimately, the problem with all of this is that the way businesses make $ with web content is kind of toxic and often leaves everyone unhappy.
I was interested to see that 404 Media offers a full text RSS feed for subscribers, which is the sorta thing that might help motivate me to subscribe to something, but I might be a very tiny minority.
I was interested to see that 404 Media offers a full text RSS feed for subscribers, which is the sorta thing that might help motivate me to subscribe to something, but I might be a very tiny minority.
@aguamielerogpz @swacknificent @ethanschoonover @awoodsnet
Well yea, but it seems like sites were more supportive of RSS while Google Reader was around, because so many people used it and it helped them shuttle their content. When Reader went away, sites had less incentive to keep supporting it.
I guess too blogs in general have faded quite a bit in favor of insta and what not.
JWSGeek@ethanschoonover @swacknificent @ssfckdt I went to Feedly when Google Reader died and never regretted it. Still the #1 way I get notified of blog posts as either 'the algorithm' or 'the dumb luck of not being online at the right time' would otherwise have me missing blog entries i follow *constantly.*
Granted, the sites that post like 20 things a day (a certain Disney Parks one in particular) get a little annoying this way, but hey.
@jwsgeek @ethanschoonover @swacknificent
Well, GR provided you a nice running feed of all the posts of your followed sites, which you could read at once, kind of like sifting email, but seperate from it. Most sitenotifications in my opinion are invasive.
Cristyn@ethanschoonover I would like to see blogs have a resurgence. I have one and ive found that it's a lot more fun when you blog within a community
Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐@ethanschoonover Let's bring back Usenet. NNTP still works just fine, and it's federated, too. NNTP servers don't have to be public, either. They make excellent groupware and knowledgebases.
https://github.com/InterNetNews/inn
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/practical-internet-groupware/1565925378/
Internet Rando@ethanschoonover Yeah, I abandoned Discord for Matrix.. Where I still discord, it's through somebody else's Matrix bridge.. 10/10, would recommend Matrix as a methodone to the Discord-as-a-heroin problem. gg
Neale@ethanschoonover I propose you add IRC to your list.
TKb0iZ 🇷🇴@ethanschoonover Wordpress and Reddit already exist!
I can't stop thinking about this, because this is what I've been doing for the last few years:
* I kicked my blog back up in August 2022. It has an RSS feed.
* SomethingAwful forums has been my only "social media" since before the fediverse got all popular.
* I started my IRCv3 server around the same time.
Like, seriously people, it's nice here. You should give it a try.
@ethanschoonover https://forums.somethingawful.com is celebrating its 25 year anniversary!
We'd love to have you swing by and say hi in the celebration forum: https://forums.somethingawful.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=692
Mack Reed@ethanschoonover Nonsense. BBS or GTFO.
@mackreed i mean, I set up my own gopher server last year for fun, so i'm an easy sell for BBSs
HTTP 1.1/418 Teapot
Seán na bhFritíortha@ethanschoonover
I never understood the mania for Discord as forum/wiki. Useful for gamers (voice chat) bit otherwise stoopid.
I never understood the mania for Discord as forum/wiki. Useful for gamers (voice chat) bit otherwise stoopid.
Blind Mapmaker@ethanschoonover Yes, please! RSS for everything again, forums for communities, blogs for articles, wikis for tech support, information and worldbuilding. Discord is great for ephemeral stuff and live chat, but let's not use it for everything.
mkb@ethanschoonover @ireneista I’m with you on blogs and RSS. Forums were always bloody awful. Swap forums for Usenet and I’m all-in.
Irenes (many)@mkb @ethanschoonover totally fair. we vibed better with Usenet, ourselves, but we know forums have been important to many people
@ireneista @mkb i was a big usenet fan as well but all of that has been lost (equally angry about how google handled the usenet archives as I am about google reader)
@ethanschoonover @mkb oh for sure. we're absolutely furious about it. we tend to be soft spoken about these things, but we're really quite upset.
Daniël Franke 
@ethanschoonover Nothing worse than being told that documentation/downloads/support is solely available on "the discord".
krejgo@ethanschoonover would Discourse and Matrix fill those holes too?
michaelbrien@ethanschoonover Came in here to mention IRC but others have already done so.
Dr Pen@ethanschoonover 100% agree. In case it's of interest for other folks reading this thread, I wrote a brief explainer on how to bring RSS feeds as individual posts into Obsidian using Simple RSS, and covered Mastodon feeds too. https://penworks.net/blog/importing-feeds-into-obsidian-with-simple-rss
WowSuchCyber@ethanschoonover @SecurityWriter Let's build a new modern forum framework and let's call it e-Pistolary.
Chris Ferdinandi@ethanschoonover I think live chat and “archival chat” (forums etc) serve two different purposes, and both have a place.
william.maggosa shared account/ID between the two would be nice, but I see a very different role for what we think of the fedi vs groups. the first is for public discourse imo while the latter is for community. I think not having a good way to do the latter has led to a lot of unnecessary conflict in the former.
Dan@ethanschoonover Have you looked into Zulip? Upsides are open source server/client, clean snappy interface, easy to do conversation threading, publicly searchable with no account creation needed. Downsides are some issues with notifications, a small learning curve for the slightly new UI paradigm, no federation afaik. Run by a company, which can be upside/downside.
Tim Zee...and encourage more use of laptops & desktops as opposed to mobile.
Anything which encourages thought as opposed to impulse.
Rexx Deane 🏳️🌈@ethanschoonover I don't understand why they removed the RSS thing from Firefox. You now have to rely on there being an icon or looking in the markup to find out whether a site has it.
@ethanschoonover I know groups that abandoned their forums for discord. I really am not a fan of discord. It favors the obsessive, it drives focus towards a single arbitrary conversation thread and stifles other conversations, it funnels dedicated topics towards under-noticed side channels to be ignored and forgotten. It's a tyranny of the over-active
MY ACCT HAS MOVED TO {below}@ethanschoonover THEOLDREADER.COM works well for RSS at its free level. Try it.