#Tapatalk was a dominant app in the pre-social media days when discussions took place on all different forums and message board sites across the internet, not centralized platforms like today. Tapatalk provided a centralized way to subscribe to all those discussions on different servers, post and comment freely, without logging into each forum site directly.

Since then #Reddit became the centralized and dominant place to engage around niche topics, killing that diverse ecosystem of forums. I'd like to see the #Fediverse become and equivalent "central" location for finding and engaging with niche topics while remaining decentralized by its nature.

We still have lots of forums running on open source #Discourse software, but we don't have an easy way to connect and engage all those communities back into #Lemmy, #ActivityPub, and the #Fediverse to make them findable with the same ease Reddit provides.

What's the best way to unify the #Fediverse with the existing forum communities that exist outside the platform web?

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[–] backpedal@fedinsfw.app 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I think of how people on the fediverse have mixed feelings about drawing in people from corporate social media:

Do those forums want to be federated?

I remember there was a retro instance a short while back that managed to reconfigure their frontend to look like a typical forum site.

If a forum community wanted, they could probably port (most of) their forum history to something like that.

[–] tedcurran@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Real interoperability should allow the publisher (them) to set the level of access (public/private) to their content AND THEN the end user (you and me) to choose the kind of client experience we use to consume that content so we can customize the user experience to our needs. That's how email and websites work. If a forum software exposed its posts and comments to the open web or RSS (or even just to logged in users), anyone should be able to open that content with the browser or app of their choice. Commercial social platforms have distorted this very basic relationship between publishers and users but we can never forget that is the way it should be.