Lemmy VS Discourse

Lemmy. Either find an existing server or run your own.

Check out Lemmy ( https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy It is a decentral reddit alternative, so everyone can host a server and all these servers are federated.

You could check out Lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

Federated opensource options exist. Lemmy is coming along nicely.

https://join-lemmy.org/ is a good option to create multi hosted superstonk network

The only elixir file (.ex/.exs) that came up configures pleroma inside this config, which is only used when testing Pleroma federation.

The lemmy network that is a reddit style system that also uses the fediverse has a lot of potential. Unfortunately the main lemmy server has gone crazy and is just as censored as reddit which defeats its value. However the wolfballs.com server is very freedom based. Hopefully that server will grow and more servers with a similar attitude will join in like what happened with the mastodon network.

https://www.discourse.org/ Should have just made a google search. Anyways. It's totally free and open source. Host on your servers

Other solution would be to go Saas way with solution like: https://circle.so/ https://www.discourse.org/ (you can connect this with wordpress or just self host it for the forum side)

It feels like Truffle Ruby has been around for a while, but just in the background. I'd love to see it succeed though, I think the author was in a video I watched from Shopify about Rails at scale, all looked positive. It would be cool to see results from it running on some of the bigger Rails open source projects like: https://github.com/discourse/discourse or https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon . I think that could spur on some adoption.

To be fair, Single Page Applications do try to address these concerns using various techniques, but that's a big topic in itself. Some SPAs are even a pleasure to use, especially if implemented well. A good example is Discourse.

Discourse

So what's everyone's favourite forum software? Which of the many packages out there would actually be suitable to replicate the usability of Slack/Discord, without making all of the messages disappear like in a black hole?

1) Discourse: https://www.discourse.org/

Looks pretty modern and also offers managed instances if you'd like, but i can't help but to feel that it's pretty JS heavy and there is perhaps too much whitespace, which makes navigating longer threads somewhat cumbersome. To me, it seems like a case of UI > UX, which is an upsetting trend that i've noticed ("make something pretty rather than something functional").

2) Flarum: https://flarum.org/

This one is perhaps a bit better in my eyes as far as the UX is concerned and seems to have actually been developed as a mobile first forum. It does have that modern look while at the same time being reasonably functional, and the idea of putting the forum structure tree in the sidebar actually works pretty well!

3) phpBB: https://www.phpbb.com/

Personally, this is my favourite from the "traditional" forum software, since it's really usable, it keeps a good information density, doesn't lose usability and isn't as JS heavy as any of the other alternatives. Also, there are plenty of plugins and even the default functionality provides you with most of the things that you'd like in a piece of forum software and the hardware requirements are pretty low.

As someone who runs a phpBB forum or two myself, the biggest pain is perhaps updating, since you run into the very same issue of never knowing whether an update will break something or not and you might have to manually alter some config files if things go sideways. Also, admittedly, the admin UX could be better, but i guess that's just the software showing its age.

That said, old is not necessarily always worse.

4) Simple Machines Forum: https://www.simplemachines.org/

To me, it looks like a slightly simpler alternative to phpBB, with similarly good readability, slightly lower information density, but overall a very similar look and feel to phpBB. Can't talk much about its features, but some people have recommended it in the past.

Also, in regards to the free plan memory limitations, has anyone here experimented with self-hosted IM solutions? Personally i'm running a Rocket.Chat (https://rocket.chat/) instance which seems pretty nice and functional, for example, for a smaller software developer team, though others also have had good experiences with Mattermost (https://mattermost.com/) or other software.