Why Are We Starting a Community Forum?
-
Hi everybody,
You may have stumbled onto this page, either through a new URL or through a post federating out to the wider network, and wondered "What the hell, why is a niche news publication launching a forum in 2025?"
The short answer to this is simple: our publication has been at the forefront of experimenting with decentralized publishing and community-building. This latest experiment involves us dipping our toes into the water and testing out an integration with the Threadiverse - that is to say, group conversation platforms such as Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, and a growing amount of other capable platforms that can all federate and talk to each other.
How We're Doing This
We've adopted NodeBB, mainly because of its native adoption of ActivityPub, but also because it seems like damned good forum software. We want to try to blur the lines between local, old-fashioned message board, and integrated communities across vast networks. Some of these experiments will involve using ActivityPub to pipe content from other places, such as our Podcast, our news publication, and a variety of other places.
We're interested in building a fun and supportive space for people working on the next generation of decentralized communication apps, platforms, and frameworks, and we're excited to see what comes of this.
-
D deadsuperhero pinned this topic on
-
Hi everybody,
You may have stumbled onto this page, either through a new URL or through a post federating out to the wider network, and wondered "What the hell, why is a niche news publication launching a forum in 2025?"
The short answer to this is simple: our publication has been at the forefront of experimenting with decentralized publishing and community-building. This latest experiment involves us dipping our toes into the water and testing out an integration with the Threadiverse - that is to say, group conversation platforms such as Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, and a growing amount of other capable platforms that can all federate and talk to each other.
How We're Doing This
We've adopted NodeBB, mainly because of its native adoption of ActivityPub, but also because it seems like damned good forum software. We want to try to blur the lines between local, old-fashioned message board, and integrated communities across vast networks. Some of these experiments will involve using ActivityPub to pipe content from other places, such as our Podcast, our news publication, and a variety of other places.
We're interested in building a fun and supportive space for people working on the next generation of decentralized communication apps, platforms, and frameworks, and we're excited to see what comes of this.
Awesome. I also like NodeBB, and look forward to other places that need forum software implementing it too (particularly if they enable ActivityPub!)
It's not especially important, but a link to PieFed that's consistent with the links to Lemmy and MBIN is https://join.piefed.social/
-
This forum looks nice, graphics and logos etc.
May I ask how long did this take to set up from start to finish?
And which mail service do you use to send out the 'confirmation emails'?
Im asking this because its the thing I had most problem with. -
Awesome. I also like NodeBB, and look forward to other places that need forum software implementing it too (particularly if they enable ActivityPub!)
It's not especially important, but a link to PieFed that's consistent with the links to Lemmy and MBIN is https://join.piefed.social/
@andrew@pythag.net said in Why Are We Starting a Community Forum?:
It's not especially important, but a link to PieFed that's consistent with the links to Lemmy and MBIN is https://join.piefed.social/
Ooh, good point, I'll fix that!
-
This forum looks nice, graphics and logos etc.
May I ask how long did this take to set up from start to finish?
And which mail service do you use to send out the 'confirmation emails'?
Im asking this because its the thing I had most problem with.@eeeee Honestly, it only took me a few hours to configure. The biggest points of confusion were the initial setup for MongoDB, as that's a bit unfamiliar to me. Overall, it wasn't too difficult to set up.
And which mail service do you use to send out the 'confirmation emails'?
I actually took the cheap option and just used SendGrid, with a manual configuration for the SMTP integration. It took a little bit of fiddling around to get everything working, but it was important to me to get this right, before launching the community.
-
Hi everybody,
You may have stumbled onto this page, either through a new URL or through a post federating out to the wider network, and wondered "What the hell, why is a niche news publication launching a forum in 2025?"
The short answer to this is simple: our publication has been at the forefront of experimenting with decentralized publishing and community-building. This latest experiment involves us dipping our toes into the water and testing out an integration with the Threadiverse - that is to say, group conversation platforms such as Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, and a growing amount of other capable platforms that can all federate and talk to each other.
How We're Doing This
We've adopted NodeBB, mainly because of its native adoption of ActivityPub, but also because it seems like damned good forum software. We want to try to blur the lines between local, old-fashioned message board, and integrated communities across vast networks. Some of these experiments will involve using ActivityPub to pipe content from other places, such as our Podcast, our news publication, and a variety of other places.
We're interested in building a fun and supportive space for people working on the next generation of decentralized communication apps, platforms, and frameworks, and we're excited to see what comes of this.
This looks great! And I also like the fact that it is run by a publication that covers multiple projects. And, as you can see, the ActivityPub integration works well. Thanks for doing this. -
S simonwood@mastodon.social shared this topic on
-
This looks great! And I also like the fact that it is run by a publication that covers multiple projects. And, as you can see, the ActivityPub integration works well. Thanks for doing this.
@scott@loves.tech Thanks, Scott! We've been thinking about doing a Threadiverse platform for a long time, but the recent introduction of NodeBB kind of feels perfect for what we're looking for. It can talk to Lemmy, PieFed, and Hubzilla, but also retains the look and feel of a message board.
-
Just signed up to get a better idea of how this thing works. I'm on a couple of forums, and several fediverse platforms, and I'm curious how a traditional forum might federate so I'm here to have a look!
@simon Thanks for joining, Simon! We're still kind of getting a feel for what this should be, and what categories to feature. We're also playing around with federation and category sync with a few different places, so hopefully this can act as a pretty robust hub for us!
