Not sure what forums software you're thinking of but vBulletin, phpBB, Discourse don't have the extra features the author is looking for.
He wrote: >Many of these make heavy use of Discord's voice channels, video chat, and screensharing. These servers have a hard requirement for adequate moderation tools for dealing with any bad actor willing to join the community. [...] Decent Mobile Experience [...]
A lot of admins shut down the forums software and moved to Discord because it didn't have the modern features they wanted. So to migrate off of Discord requires an alternative that duplicates most of what makes Discord valuable. That's what the topic admins wish for but the current options don't give them that.
>otherwise irc, bluesky, matrix
Author analyzed the IRC and Matrix deficiencies as not being acceptable.
> Author analyzed the IRC and Matrix deficiencies as not being acceptable.
Which I have all kinds of questions for; my Synapse install is the FOSS community release, and pmap -d shows <1.5G of RAM usage even without the paid-org-optimizations. I thought maybe that was including postgres, but that shows only ~2M. This isn't a single-user instance either - I'm running half a dozen bridges, and use Matrix with my fiancee. Not much above single-user, but also less than half the claimed 4Gig at idle.
I do see ~3Gig mapped (still <4), but that hardly feels fair - any process will start to consume unused RAM, and it can be pushed out when under pressure.
The E2EE breaking for OP is something I haven't seen in somewhere between months and years either, which suggests the entire thing was last trialled before (or shortly after) one of the major performance improvement pushes
The point regarding Soatok's blog about the vuln is absolutely not a good look, though I'd want to dig into it a bit more to see if it's "a malicious admin can break the encryption", "a malicious actor can break the encryption", or "a malicious actor can access metadata". Not great whichever the case may be though.
Discord is handling some different tasks, One it is used for overlay voicechat by gamers, both one on one and group chats. Second it is used as an instant messenger which is really pared to the voicechat aspect. Third it's used as a type of forum. It seems those two types of uses may need different solutions. I've read some concerns about Discord's weakness as a type of forum and customer support platform for some software and projects.
When you make forums you compete with forum aggregators
with more history and social clout, i.e. a reddit replacement.
If someone made better Reddit, it could have a chance, however
reddit-type aggregators crypronite is hosting their own videos/media,
which makes it prohibitively expensive for small companies without
ads and sponsored posts which in turn make them less of "forum aggregator" and
more like facebook social feeds: mainly video/image based dopamine rides
instead of actual knowledge worth keeping.
People are allowed to make niche websites. We can disaggregate. It's probably better for the web if we did disaggregate given how many of the aggregators such as Wikia and Reddit and more have shown the tragedy of the commons that an aggregator over-specialize in being ad companies (or other questionable business models) over the long term rather than directly continuing to benefit the communities that trusted them as hosts in the first place, and often to the detriment and diaspora of those vary communities as they lose trust piecemeal and have fewer chances to "lift and shift" the entire community as a whole out of the aggregator in the same semi-easy manner they were aggregated in the first place.
The "social clout" advantage the giant aggregators have gained they are often working to lose a few communities at a time. Building a niche community site outside of the aggregators isn't competing with them in the same way any longer.
Maybe it is a time for building smaller niche sites again?
Not sure what forums software you're thinking of but vBulletin, phpBB, Discourse don't have the extra features the author is looking for.
He wrote: >Many of these make heavy use of Discord's voice channels, video chat, and screensharing. These servers have a hard requirement for adequate moderation tools for dealing with any bad actor willing to join the community. [...] Decent Mobile Experience [...]
A lot of admins shut down the forums software and moved to Discord because it didn't have the modern features they wanted. So to migrate off of Discord requires an alternative that duplicates most of what makes Discord valuable. That's what the topic admins wish for but the current options don't give them that.
>otherwise irc, bluesky, matrix
Author analyzed the IRC and Matrix deficiencies as not being acceptable.