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General interest mega-boards and forum sustainability (community.nodebb.org)

submitted 4 weeks ago by julian@community.nodebb.org to c/general-discussion@community.nodebb.org

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I'm away from my desk for the next few days and so I'll likely be posting more open ended discussion questions.

Recently I've been thinking more about the decline of forums of yesteryear and how hosting a forum has always been rather niche.

That got me thinking about how one of Reddit's "killer features" was that just anybody could create a subreddit. The same could be said about Facebook groups as well.

You don't get that with forums, only the admin can create categories/forums, and by extension that usually limited the rise of general interest boards, and more towards niche topic-focused boards. It also meant that basically every board had a "general discussion" board or "random" board.

Would there be interest in NodeBB supporting something like this... Basically, the ability for anyone to set up a category and instantly moderate it, and build your own sub community inside a community? Does this ruin the magic of forums?

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[–] johannab@cosocial.ca 2 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

@julian

OMG yes? This is how my favourite network ever, Ravelry, wound up happening.

🥰😍🥰😻🧡

[–] julian@community.nodebb.org 1 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

johannab@cosocial.ca I don't actually know how the Ravelry community is built up, are they sub communities around a centralized discussion board?

[–] johannab@cosocial.ca 1 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

@julian

Geez I gotta find a way to demo this to Fedi people.

So, Ravelry never meant to be a social site AFAIK. They had a handful of "Forums" that were to be online help oriented, dialogue with either the site's developers, or their contracted or volunteer knitting & yarn & pattern experts. Then they added "groups" which included a forum, and some Pages (static info for the Group), few other things AND IT WENT NUTS.

And it has somehow remained the most civilized social network ever.

[–] johannab@cosocial.ca 2 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

@julian There's no "main" vs. "sub", other than by default all users join (and can leave) the "Big 6" official Ravelry forums.

Groups are all subject to Ravelry's TOS but can be created by anyone, any topic. There are lots of abandoned or inactive ones, and they could probably do a clean up (but also probably ... don't need to bother?)

Ravelry users belong to as many groups as they want to bother with, under one ID.

It's a unique site. Even if there was no emulating it, it's a case study.

[–] julian@community.nodebb.org 1 points 4 weeks ago

johannab@cosocial.ca that's really interesting, and bears further study 🙂

I love hearing stories about community building that happens against all odds!