this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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What do you get when you take a traditional forum, add vote based sorting so that the best post and comments (in theory) rise to the top to avoiding the issue of thread bumping, use a nested comment structure so that individual conversations in each thread can be easily followed, and allow anyone to make a subforum as they please?
You get reddit. (or now, Lemmy) The only thing missing in Lemmy is topic tags, which I think is a nice to have, but by no means necessary.
There is a reason why very few people uses forums and most of conversation nowadays takes place on social media, while reddit and Discord has but all but replaced them. So, replacing Discourse/Zenforo as the software to use for independent Internet forums should be the aim for Lemmy to significantly grow.
Strangely, Discourse's federation model seemed to be based on Mastodon compatibility instead of Lemmy-like Groups, which I think is a mistake.
I think you're missing the point of a forum like discourse, which is most definitely not a classic forum.
In no way is it similar to lemmy or Reddit when it comes to functionality or the problem space that it solves for. It's essentially stackoverflow, for niche communities, do you really think you could replace the utility of stackoverflow with.... Reddit?
It's specifically tailored to q&A, knowledge sharing/archiving, and as a living knowledge base. It does an excellent job of that, with copious features built specifically to enable and support that purpose. Which both lemmy and Reddit lack, they aren't even in the same problem space.
The platforms that actually utilize discourse effectively are some of the best to work on. Similar communities on social media platforms don't have anywhere near the level of quality, engagement, knowledge, or problem solving. Even simple features that encourage engagement in months or years old threads are massive boon.
It really is not much of a step to take your logic and replace lemmy or Reddit with Discord as a Q&A support and knowledge base platform. Which we all know is a terrible idea, and largely leads to a loss of knowledge and destroys discoverability.
Overall I get the feeling that you may not have experienced what makes that platform powerful? Which understandably can lead to thoughts that it's "just another forum", and that it is supplementable with a social media platform (which in the reality of it is laughably bad).
Check out https://forum.babylonjs.com/ for example. The framework is an absolute pain in the ass to onboard too but because their forum is just so damn good, it was a breeze compared to others.
Let me address some of your points:
Linear post structure, sorting based on latest response, so it is a traditional in vein of old BBS/phpBB systems.
Upvote based sorting and nested comment structure means StackExchange/Overflow is closer to reddit than it is Discourse.
Reddit, Lemmy, and Discourse are all public forums, Discord is a chatroom.
Thread necromancy for month/year old dead threads has always been considered offenses to almost every single forum, which is why most forums lock posts after a month or so. It's not a feature, it's a fundamental flaw with the sorting.
I'm genuinely curious, what are some of those features? I can't think of any significant one, outside of tags.
Forums are ultimately shaped by people, so I would say these forum succeeded in spite of the software instead of because of the software.