Every service that joins the fediverse the more terrifying the fediverse becomes to the big tech companies.
And none of that matters if we let the big tech companies into the Fediverse.
What we need to do is have a copyleft licence for all federated content so anyone who uses it for any purpose (data minibg ai etc) must make it opensource and federated then they can come do whatever they like good luck profiting if u cant own the servuce or the content.
Say hello to Creative Commons. You can license stuff with an express interdiction for commercial use
What is Discourse? Love the name of anything that references gives a nod to The Dialectic but I’m cautious…
An old style forum service with a modern twist, made by one of the founders of Stack Overflow
Specifically its co-creator was Jeff Atwood, who is also the writer of coding horror and recently posted a pretty good endorsement of Mastadon and other non-twitter services.
He was actually one of only a dozen or so people I followed on very early twitter, before losing interest in the bullshit on there by 2010 or so and moving to Reddit.
Where/how I can haz?
You can either rent an instance, or run your own.
I’d rather not host anything, I more meant like participate in a Lemmy.world type deal?
Ah, okay. That’s not how that works, forums are usually used for specific contexts, like support from a specific company.
As an example, Guild Wars 2 for the longest time - don’t know whether they still do - ran a forum that was a highly customized version of Discourse. Turtle Rock also used it for their support forum. Fairphone’s forums are entirely on Discourse (and it’s pretty obvious in their case as they use a quite vanilla installation).
Thank you for enlightening me, I didn’t really get it when I first encountered it. Like, how’s that different from like ZenDesk?
Its not proprietary software and not owned by a for profit company. Also because of the previous things, you can heavily modify it to fit the thing your forum is about.
Wow… things are starting to come together! Existing projects won’t need to install another service which makes it much easier to join the fediverse.
This is great! Next stop: usenet
This is huge, they’re basically what every forum still out here use, you’ll rarely encounter anything else.
Given that Reddit became what every company and project use as a forum, I feel like this is a better alternative for them than Lemmy.
And maybe that will solve the biggest gripe I have with Discourse… The stupid way they display date and time. I once replied to a 4 year old’s post thinking it was a few days old…
