If you haven’t heard of lemmy, it’s an open source, federated reddit replacement that’s getting an insane amount of development work.
Here’s what I think the forums would stand to gain:
An influx of users
A. Lemmy is federated, this means users from all the other instances could interact with the thrive community
B. More people are familiar with the format of lemmy (due to it being similar to the format of reddit) and thus it would be less intimidating for new users
Threaded discussions
A. Threaded discussions would allow for much more productive, and on-topic discussions, you could reply to an individual post without it becoming a stream of things, and anyone can jump into any part of a post without necessarily having to read EVERYTHING, i think this would be great for fostering discussions
Active development
A. Lemmy is under extremely active development and is rapidly improving, we would stand to gain from this in various ways, but, just having an actively developed forum that’s gaining features seems like an obvious net positive to me.
Furthermore, I think an open source federated discussion forum just seems to be in the spirit of the project. Any thoughts?
I would also be willing to do all the CSS work to make it look like this forum, if appearance matters!
Discourse was not federated, federation ensures that you would gain a number of users. Also, by the nature of this site having an admin, you could export users with the same credentials, such that the only change you’d have to make is logging back in to your account.
This would also put all of the work for maintenance into other peoples hands, freeing up devs to not work on the forum
If you don’t understand federation, look into it, there’s a reason small nothing lemmy forums instantly have a ton of users, and it’s federation.
If we federated using lemmy, we would have effectively gained potentially tens of thousands of users that wouldn’t even have to go through the process of registering here: the federation - a statistics hub
we’d also gain the kbin people, and the mastodon people.
Furthermore, one might not want to just use these forums as these forums, if we used lemmy, one could browse an entire link aggregator with thrive on the side, meaning significantly more activity.
I highly doubt that such a move would increase users. Also I’ve read that making a federated instance that allows public sign ups is really complicated in terms of law conformance (user data, privacy, etc.).
So at most this would be just a clone of our subreddit, but on an existing lemmy site that would allow us to be there. And the reddit experience is vastly different from a normal forum experience. It’d make much more sense to suggest that we close our subreddit / don’t give it any attention anymore and direct everyone who wants that experience to lemmy.
Now Mastodon on the other hand, is something we’ll set up at some point (as replacement for twitter which no longer works on our main site) but as seems to be very common in Thrive, there’s many more ideas than people doing things.
Also nothing is preventing anyone from starting up an unofficial Thrive community on lemmy. If such a thing gains traction I’m not against joining such a page as moderator and making it official.
I highly doubt that such a move would increase users. Also I’ve read that making a federated instance that allows public sign ups is really complicated in terms of law conformance (user data, privacy, etc.).
I think having the forums posts appear in the “everything” tab of all of the various lemmys would without a doubt increase users, there’s far more people using lemmy than there are on these forums, and if even 1% of those people see thrive posts regularly and decide to partake, that would be a huge increase in users.
As for it being difficult, yeah, that’s fair, it would be difficult to do, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good idea or worth doing, however.
And the reddit experience is vastly different from a normal forum experience. It’d make much more sense to suggest that we close our subreddit / don’t give it any attention anymore and direct everyone who wants that experience to lemmy.
Can I ask what makes it vastly different in your eyes? The only difference I see is the lack of threading, and that seems to me like a straight downgrade.
It would also make it so that you could use the various lemmy apps to browse the forum, which would make mobile significantly better.
well you see, lemmy is the name of a koopaling from the super Mario bros. franchise. If we moved the forums there, we may face some legal issues in the far future. Hence why I believe its dangerous for such a change to take place. The suggestion is good, but the consequences of the change would be disastrous.
Unless lemmy has extremely low number of users, this doesn’t work. Thrive has been on reddit for years and I don’t think many people at all just randomly see posts from the thrive subreddit. The same would apply to lemmy.
I haven’t used lemmy personally, but if it works like a link agregator like reddit, then most of the discussions are superficial and engaged in by people who haven’t read whatever was linked fully. At least I’m guilty of this.
Contrast that to forums where most threads are not links to cool stuff elsewhere that people found, but people starting discussions they want to engage in. The primary purpose is completely different.
I mean if you were offering to write custom CSS, why not help fix up the mobile view for these forums? Discourse has an inbuilt feature that allows you to install the forums as an app on your phone homescreen. Also unless I’m misremembering there is / was a generic discourse reader app.
Unless lemmy has extremely low number of users, this doesn’t work. Thrive has been on reddit for years and I don’t think many people at all just randomly see posts from the thrive subreddit. The same would apply to lemmy.
This is because on reddit, using the “all” or “everything” section is much more difficult, on lemmy, due to the number of communities, combined with the scaled sort method, the everything tab works significantly better, I went from never using it on reddit, to using it almost exclusively on lemmy, and this seems true for many other people. Reddit is MUCH bigger than lemmy, so of course this would never work there.
I haven’t used lemmy personally, but if it works like a link agregator like reddit, then most of the discussions are superficial and engaged in by people who haven’t read whatever was linked fully. At least I’m guilty of this.
This is fully resolveable by one of two methods, one more extreme than the other.
Contrast that to forums where most threads are not links to cool stuff elsewhere that people found, but people starting discussions they want to engage in. The primary purpose is completely different.
The primary purpose is context dependent.
I mean if you were offering to write custom CSS, why not help fix up the mobile view for these forums? Discourse has an inbuilt feature that allows you to install the forums as an app on your phone homescreen. Also unless I’m misremembering there is / was a generic discourse reader app.
I’m only willing to maintain lemmy, I don’t see the advantage of discourse and want to spend my time on technology I actually like. Furthermore a PWA is no substitute for a proper API that anyone can make apps for. There are countless apps already for lemmy. And I don’t have experience with CSS for mobile, I’ve exclusively done work for desktop/laptop purposes.
I know I have it as an app on my Home Screen, don’t know if that’s a discourse feature or a safari feature though
As to a move, I feel like while it could be a cool idea to give this Lemmy thing a try, it is not the right move to scrap the forums, which are known to work, in favor of trying out a new site which may or may not have one or two things that could be useful
So I’m of pretty much the same opinion as Hhyyrylainen - somebody could start something if they’d like, but it shouldn’t be official until it’s proven to work
I don’t know if it’s just me being dumb, but I just have a hard time parsing Reddits threaded comments, I like having everything related to the subject in chronological order like an actual conversation, even if that means 2 conversations will take up the same space simultaneously.
Instead it ends up with each side tangent going down a little branch and I forget where in the conversation it’s supposed to be and have to backtrack, and makes any answer somewhere in the threads ambiguous who in the conversation could have saw it since it’s not linear.
Threads would be a strict downgrade to me.
That’s not what they were referring to. From what I understood, they were saying that having threads at all was what they disliked, and they’d much prefer a style like this forum currently has
Moving the forums to a Lemmy instance—or creating one—seems too much work for something that won’t have that much advantages (along with decreasing the number of active users).
Discourse can be federated with ActivityPub using a plugin, but I don’t think that the vantages of federation would be worth it in the forum.
r/thrive solves only the issue of threading, it doesn’t solve:
Appearing on the everything tab (this only happens on lemmy because of scaled sort + fewer active users)
having an API for mobile apps to use that many mobile apps exist for
Federation
How do you figure? Federation could cause a massive influx of users, since people don’t need to even be aware of thrive for it to appear in their feeds. But I had no idea discourse supported activitypub. That’s interesting.
Then why don’t you make a Thrive community on a lemmy server you have an account on? If it is so easy to get random people to see the content and interact with it, it should take no time at all for it to take off and we can make it an official Thrive community thing.
I’m not interested in maintaining any sort of a community, I’m suggesting this because I believe it is worth considering, not because i’m willing to do all of the work if nobody else thinks it’s a good idea, and this seems rather unanimous.