i started using the internet in the late 2000’s and still remember when you search for something most of the times it would return with a forum post … now its just random websites … if you ever need real and concise answer you have to add site:reddit.com at every search and since discord or twitter are not crawlable by these search crawlers they are not mentioned . Where did all those forums went…are there still active forums ?
That’s a good point. A really good app that can parse a standard framework that a thousand independent forums can stand up for their own purposes (Say, MyBB for instance), would go a long way towards reviving the forum scene as a whole with a very Lemmy-like or reddit-like experience.
That app already exists and is called Tapatalk. I think almost every forum I’ve visited in the last decade has a banner on mobile that suggests using Tapatalk.
It’s not very good though it seems.
Yeah Tapatalk tried to do that for VBulletin but the problem is that little vBulletin sites don’t have very deep pockets to delve. Little forum sites are supported by small time revenue like network ads, and limited brand sponsorships and the occasional member donation. There isn’t a lot of money in this scene as a whole, so there is relatively little innovation. In a way that’s fine. The last thing forums want is mass participation.
Make it a FOSS project then. No profit motive, no problem, right?
Granted, I understand that’s hinging on someone actually wanting to work on this project for free. But I feel like FOSS decentralized forum software is something we might be able to get the grognards on board with.
Are there other good examples of successful open source mobile apps? Where the app client itself is open source?
Unfortunately those kind of apps would trip cloudflare’s bot protection feature, which is used by a lot of independent forum operators.