webmention.io VS Discourse

Webmentions (webmention.io) are a way to bring social activity and interactivity to your site without having it on your platform itself or needing to have complex systems in place. Harness the activity, audience, and functionality from existing platforms.

async function getMentions(url) { let mentions = []; let page = 0; let perPage = 100; while (true) { const results = await fetch( `https://webmention.io/api/mentions.jf2?target=${url}&per-page=${perPage}&page=${page}` ).then((r) => r.json()); mentions = mentions.concat(results.children); if (results.children.length < perPage) { break; } page++; } return mentions.sort((a, b) => ((a.published || a['wm-received']) < (b.published || b['wm-received']) ? -1 : 1)); }

Webmentions: https://webmention.io/

In the interim, I found myself pondering why every webmentions-on-Hugo solution I’d ever found up to now used JavaScript, rather than trying to do it purely in Hugo. After all, Hugo sports plenty of data-grabbing horsepower. For example: in my own experience to date, I’ve found Hugo's getJSON feature just as useful as the node-fetch on which the aforementioned JS relied to grab data from webmention.io.

One of the building blocks for such a system might be something like:

https://webmention.io/

{ "type": "feed", "name": "Webmentions", "children": [ { "type": "entry", "author": { "type": "card", "name": "Jon Kuperman", "photo": "https://webmention.io/avatar/pbs.twimg.com/a52326c0080bba610767505756be327891f63722c0ceb6515de5840097c65cb9.jpg", "url": "https://twitter.com/jkup" }, "url": "https://twitter.com/jkup/status/1365400108016291841", "published": "2021-02-26T20:35:28+00:00", "wm-received": "2021-02-26T21:23:21Z", "wm-id": 1048723, "wm-source": "https://brid.gy/comment/twitter/raymondcamden/1365399913987792900/1365400108016291841", "wm-target": "https://webmentions.vercel.app/posts/alpha/", "content": { "html": "hello!\n\"u-mention\" href=\"https://twitter.com/raymondcamden\">\n\"u-mention\" href=\"https://webmentions.vercel.app/\">\n\"u-mention\" href=\"https://www.raymondcamden.com/\">", "text": "hello!" }, "in-reply-to": "https://webmentions.vercel.app/posts/alpha/", "wm-property": "in-reply-to", "wm-private": false }, { "type": "entry", "author": { "type": "card", "name": "Jonathan Bossenger", "photo": "https://webmention.io/avatar/pbs.twimg.com/211d2d7837e89b60b4399dfc76f5aa3aad8b2d792335f08ecd65ce6c73da48cb.jpg", "url": "https://twitter.com/jon_bossenger" }, "url": "https://twitter.com/jon_bossenger/status/1365402390212587527", "published": "2021-02-26T20:44:32+00:00", "wm-received": "2021-02-26T21:23:17Z", "wm-id": 1048721, "wm-source": "https://brid.gy/post/twitter/raymondcamden/1365402390212587527", "wm-target": "https://webmentions.vercel.app/posts/alpha/", "content": { "html": "I assume the copy of Edge runs on Ubuntu? \"https://webmentions.vercel.app/posts/alpha/\">webmentions.vercel.app/posts/alpha/\n\"u-mention\" href=\"https://webmentions.vercel.app/\">", "text": "I assume the copy of Edge runs on Ubuntu? webmentions.vercel.app/posts/alpha/" }, "mention-of": "https://webmentions.vercel.app/posts/alpha/", "wm-property": "mention-of", "wm-private": false }, { "type": "entry", "author": { "type": "card", "name": "? cannot even", "photo": "https://webmention.io/avatar/pbs.twimg.com/1f2ab7fe8fb6c20b4a2be803b95f6559677d0b88577a091c2b1755f70dff4247.jpg", "url": "https://twitter.com/diffalot" }, "url": "https://twitter.com/diffalot/status/1365406879459860480", "published": "2021-02-26T21:02:22+00:00", "wm-received": "2021-02-26T21:23:06Z", "wm-id": 1048716, "wm-source": "https://brid.gy/post/twitter/raymondcamden/1365406879459860480", "wm-target": "https://webmentions.vercel.app/posts/alpha/", "content": { "html": "Testing webmentions Alpha Post \"https://webmentions.vercel.app/posts/alpha/\">webmentions.vercel.app/posts/alpha/", "text": "Testing webmentions Alpha Post webmentions.vercel.app/posts/alpha/" }, "mention-of": "https://webmentions.vercel.app/posts/alpha/", "wm-property": "mention-of", "wm-private": false } ] }

> 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.