General interest mega-boards and forum sustainability
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.
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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?
General interest mega-boards and forum sustainability
Not sure my opinion counts as it's been almost 2 years since I seriously looked into forum admin, and I just peek in here from time to time because I like the cozier feel of old-school forums compared to modern social media.
Anyway, I don't see the harm in allowing users to create their own communities assuming the feature is off by default. My only issue, and I'm not sure it's even an issue, is that this, along with NodeBB's use of ActivityPub, pushes NodeBB into the niche of other Threadiverse platforms like Lemmy and Piefed. The only difference is the terms used and default presentation. Don't get me wrong the defaults have a HUGE impact on community culture. As I've pointed out elsewhere something as simple as the default sorting order of posts effects how people browse, post, and organize the content they present. Lemmy is, by default, a stream of new content, whereas forums are, by default, a place for long-lasting discussions.
Allowing user-created subforums would, I suspect, have a similarly huge effect on how NodeBB communities are run by mods and admins and how they feel to users.