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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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[–] informapirata@community.nodebb.org 3 points 3 weeks ago

This is an excellent idea, as demonstrated by the fact that many self-created communities (≈categories) on Lemmy have achieved significant global success. However, Lemmy's implementation is unsatisfactory and needs to be adjusted. I am the administrator of a Lemmy instance as well as a NodeBB instance, and I must admit that at the height of Lemmy's development, we never allowed autonomous community creation. This was due to some issues that arose with mastodon when homonymous communities and users existed. It was also because it was impossible to implement an approval process or ensure that the quality of the communities met the instance's standards. For this reason, the process for creating communities by users consisted of a request from the registered user and a creation reserved for administrators.

What I would like to see in NodeBB is the ability to create communities, but keep them in a sort of "limbo," a "section" where new communities remain until they reach acceptable quality levels for the instance's standards.

This is in addition to the entire user credit system, which I imagine could also be set up to achieve a suitable score for building a community.

Perhaps I'm asking too much, but NodeBB's development has been so impressive so far that I wouldn't be surprised if you could implement a feature like this.