Patchwork VS Discourse

You're effectively describing Scuttlebutt in a nutshell. Small communities that are formed ad-hoc by peering with each other. "Follow" mean you'll help replicate their content for others who follow them + you. Scuttlebutt is already successful even though it's very small so far. Tags and other things can be used to explore content on the network, as long as you've found an entry-point.

I'm a bit split about spreading the word about Scuttlebutt, I don't want to ruin it since it's already so great. But felt it was very related to what you were writing, so here goes nothing :)

In case you wanna join: https://scuttlebutt.nz/

The client I'm using is https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork

> Tell me another platform that is free, has realtime chat, voice and video, has stable service, allows sharing images and other media, with good ownership management... and is open source.

Mattermost: https://mattermost.com/

Rocket.Chat: https://www.rocket.chat/

Nextcloud Talk: https://nextcloud.com/talk/

Self hosting and some assembly required. I've run all of them on cheap VPSes to explore a Slack/Discord replacement, neither was mindblowing but all of them seemed okay (Nextcloud's offering was rather barebones, though).

Audio and video support varies because getting those right is challenging, at best you'd just integrate with something like Jitsi, that one's actually pretty good for meetings and such: https://jitsi.org/ and has a cloud version too: https://meet.jit.si/ (yet people still go for Zoom and it's odd UI/UX choices)

I actually rather liked forums back in the day, but I guess nobody will be setting up that many phpBB instances in the current year, though projects like Discourse also seem promising: https://www.discourse.org/

I don't think many people at all will be leaving Discord, due to how entrenched the platform is (network effect): if you want people to help you with what you're working on, you go where they are, not vice versa.

Discourse is also open source https://github.com/discourse/discourse

I disagree. Lots of communities, e.g. Julia or Stan, use https://www.discourse.org. Discourse is GPL2 and emulates old Internet forums.

Why isn't Discourse being listed here for forum software? It's open source and designed for modern communities. https://www.discourse.org/

Discourse is open source: https://github.com/discourse/discourse

You could hook it up to a mail provider and can host it yourself for less if you wanted.

I was reading mastodon.social's privacy policy, and noticed that the link at the bottom to Discourse's privacy policy links to Discourse's Github. I'm surprised because I thought it would be the privacy policy on discourse.org.

Yep. Any platform run by someone else can kick you off for any reason, and time.

You should consider looking into running discourse, which is a modernized forum software: https://github.com/discourse/discourse

Nice examples of what it looks like:

https://discourse.nixos.org/

https://forum.level1techs.com/

As a bonus, the content and community will be accessible to search engines, so it’s easy to find answers to problems that gave been already been addressed.

In general, consider combining the two, where discourse is the anchor of the community that can’t be yanked out from under you, while discord is the one that sells the data from your players in exchange for free voice and text chat.

It’s also possible to enable logging in with discord credentials https://meta.discourse.org/t/configure-discord-login-for-dis...

As well as pushing content from discord to discourse so it’s not hidden and losable: https://blog.discourse.org/2021/05/discord-and-discourse-bet...

So, I'm asking myself if you would be interested in joining a good old-fashioned forum (probably using discourse as software) in order to communicate with other gifted people around the globe. And please add any ideas you might have for a platform like this.