Hey everyone, with the new Discord changes, I decided it was a great excuse for me to finally try to ditch discord. I mostly used discord for my creative endeavors through the years (collaborating on projects, help with software - looking at you Blender and Godot, and etc) but now I really only have my small community that I was trying to start back up based on my board game project.

As someone who drifts from project to project, and often tries to find other people who want to participate in projects - this forum is meant to fill two needs:

A communication and contributor hub for the various open source and creative commons projects I am currently working on, as well as a centralized location to access information and assets for said projects.
A place for other creative individuals to network, collaborate, and share their own projects - or even simply chat and meet like minded individuals.

I am a huge advocate for the creative commons, open source software, and the overall Libre community that counters the capitalist models that are so prevalent in the online space. While members of this community don't need to share these same ideals, I would like to foster a community that can lift up and encourage others who contribute to this space. It would be nice if we could create a community where people help and contribute to each others creative endeavors and improve the FOSS/CC community.

And honestly, I kind of miss the days when forums were the primary form of communication, before discord - so I am excited to see if this community can take off at all.

The community is non existent at the moment, but if any of you would be willing to check it out and stick around for a while to see if we can grow - I would be greatly appreciative. If anyone has feedback for improvement or ideas for direction of the forum, I would love to hear any and all constructive criticism.

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[–] fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk 10 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Lovely idea, and I'm glad to see a "real forum".

[–] wwwgem@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Waiting for you to join ;)

[–] fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk 2 points 4 weeks ago

It's on my to-do list when I have a bit of time :)

[–] harmbugler@piefed.social 4 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Can your forum federate?

[–] UnfinishedProjects@lemmy.zip 14 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm just going to copy and paste this here from my other cross post:

lol, yeah - its not lost on me that Lemmy is a forum, if that is what you are getting at. But I personally equate lemmy to reddit, and while there are subs for niche topics, the idea of a standalone forum for my specific purpose seems like it has more of an opportunity to create the "small, close knit" type of community that doesn't seem to fit within the Lemmy sphere.

I could totally be wrong, and maybe its nostalgia, but something about a good old forum seems to bring something different to the table in my eyes.

[–] Auster@thebrainbin.org 3 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Wouldn't there be standard forums with fediverse integration, like NodeBB?

[–] UnfinishedProjects@lemmy.zip 3 points 4 weeks ago

I honestly wasn't aware of this, and I looked into it and NodeBB will be a great option if/when we eventually migrate off of the free hosted forum (currently using freeFlarum for the initial community building, as I don't want to spend money on this until i am sure a user base is able to be built up).

Thanks for this info though - I think that this will be the best bet moving forward - as this way its pretty much the best of both worlds (a more personalized platform outside of lemmy/piefed, but also able to integrate into the Fediverse)

[–] latex@feddit.org 2 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

tell us more about ur idea

[–] UnfinishedProjects@lemmy.zip 1 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

What more do you want to know?

[–] latex@feddit.org 2 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

discord is just a SaaS version of mIRC, as i said i want to read more about ur idea, everything you got

[–] UnfinishedProjects@lemmy.zip 1 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

It's not really that I have an "idea" more so that I am shifting my community (well shifting is a poor choice of words - as my small community had been abandoned for a while, and I am reattempting to start it again) to a forum. Discord's structure was great when I used to play video games and needed a voice chat server to talk with friends or share screens, but for my current purpose of trying to gather a community around open source and creative projects - I think a forum is more fitting (for the majority of scenarios at least). The forum I'm currently trying to use also has an instant messaging chat built into it, for more instant communications.

If the community grows to the point where people are collaborating in real time and need voice chats/video sharing, I think at that point they can DM each other and organize a 3rd party software to conduct those meeting.

I just think that for my specific purpose, a forum is suitable - while for others it might not be.

[–] latex@feddit.org 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

For what amount of users ? Thousands ? Hundreds of thausands of users ? single server ? Multi server ? Type of storage ? Is there any architecture on ur mind by now ? Etc... asking just to try to understand ur goals, if i can help

[–] UnfinishedProjects@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 weeks ago

I just wrote a post about the plans, in case you actually want to read a bit more into it (https://unfinishedprojects.flarum.cloud/blog/11-outlining-our-community-roadmap).

But in short I'm mostly just trying to create a small community - the original community that I am planning to restart is largely abandoned, so I won't be pulling over a userbase. Essentially I am starting from scratch.

As of now I am simply using a free hosting option to test the waters and see if this is something that will even gain traction. As soon as I can get a handful of people and I'm confident that members will actually be interested in an old school forum despite Lemmy/piefed/reddit - then I'm planning on hosting a nodeBB forum on a VPS. Essentially I'm at the point where I'm trying to gather interest before I make a switch to a permanent platform.

[–] tastemyglaive@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

If you want to work, get involved with https://spacebar.chat/ (actually replicating Discord in FOSS) or help maintain XMPP clients

[–] UnfinishedProjects@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 weeks ago

Oh this is promising! I'm actually not a good enough programmer to contribute to production level open source projects - although I think it would be awesome to be able to if I had the skillet.