Bring Xenforo to the Fediverse

[sub_ubi]

There seem to be two ways people are federating forums. I'd be happy with either one really, or a different method you dream up. I just like federation.

1) The singular timeline. Users "subscribe" to various forums: neogaf, ign, stevehoffman, the forum you run, et. al., and then popular threads appear in their fediverse timeline. This replicates the experience of joining facebook groups or reddit subs, where interesting threads from followed communities are pushed to the user. An example with activitypub.

2) Community-owners pick and choose forums from other communities to display alongside their own. The founder of Lemmy made an adorable demo of the idea,



This looks like a regular forum index except one of the forums, "lemmyBB", is not local. It exists on an entirely different community with different users, yet both local and foreign users can post within that forum. Imagine adding stevehoffman's "audio hardware" forum to your tech community, or realcavsfans adding a forum from kingsfans for some healthy NBA debate.

 

[MySiteGuy]

Yes, it would be great if Google and Bing had a "forum" tab to easily search for forum content. But we obviously can't rely on them, given the fact that forum usage has been declining in favor of other social media giant sites.

Google had for a while a "discussions" link at the top where you could filter search results by various traditional discussion types. Apparently it didn't do well enough to keep around.

 

[TPerry]

It doesn't help that Joel is a shill who'll cover for anything they did.

Have known that for a long time.. and their staff is afraid of anyone make the IPS developers mad and them taking their toys and going home...
After almost 10,000 posts over there I got tired of it and asked to have my account deleted.

 

[Empty]

idk if anyone has said it yet but the Fediverse is nothing like reddit and is very different from tapatalk. becoming federated would bring up revenue and traffic, federation is at this point likely the future, the internet is too big to remain fractured and disconnected. Finding some way to be in the fediverse would breathe new life into forums overall.it would not lower traffic, it would bring users back. the potential for this is staggering.

with the mentality of not wanting to appear alongside your competition, the thing is that there's a pretty good chance you're already competing and you don't even know it. a forums most regular user is likely still spending most of their time on the mainstream social media sites as well as other forums.

also the way it works is that no site owner can just be forced to be federated so in the end those who dislike this concept can just opt out entirely.

 

[benFF]

Google had for a while a "discussions" link at the top where you could filter search results by various traditional discussion types. Apparently it didn't do well enough to keep around.

I remember ages and ages ago they had that.

Then last year they announced they would bring it back, but I've never actually had it come up... Was it a US only thing?

 

[zappaDPJ]

That site has become an IPS "suck up"... so be prepared to get "roasted" over there if you complain to loudly about IPS.

As you know I'm an admin there and in reality TAZ is populated by Xenforo 'fan boys' or so we are constantly being told.

Personally I think IPS or Invision Community if you prefer are well ahead of the forum curve (compared to the competition) but their management style is unpredictable, unprofessional and potentially their downfall. @MySiteGuy has already listed a number of reasons which validate that assertion in an early post so there's no reason for me to rehash it.

 

[TPerry]

As you know I'm an admin there and in reality TAZ is populated by Xenforo 'fan boys' or so we are constantly being told.

Uh-huh... proof is in the pudding as they say.

Personally I think IPS or Invision Community if you prefer are well ahead of the forum curve

They definitely are... it's their "business practices" that many have issue with as you agree that has been mentioned.

 

[Dad.]

1. The recent announcement where individual components can no longer be purchased. You must now purchase all of them, raising the minimum cost of entry to $499.

2. The recent announcement where after the first year, you must pay a month-to-month maintenance fee. Essentially turning self-hosted into a quasi SAAS model. You can save all little paying the month to month a full year at a time, but it still raises the minimum annual cost to $199 IIRC.

3. The recent announcement that if you do not pay for upgrades for two years, your license is no longer eligible for upgrades, and you must purchase a full license again.

4. All of the above changes, they didn't actually announce it until after someone noticed they had changed the purchase/license page, and asked about it. They've done this before, rolling out changes without announcement.

5. The announcement last week they are closing their marketplace. This will include the ability to automatically install within the admin panel.

6. When they abruptly switched to no longer allowing you to download past versions you'd paid for. Essentially forcing license renewals on you if you needed to redownload because you didn't have a backup installation ZIP file.

7. Changing their licensed URL policy twice (that I know of).

8. Changing their perpetual license policy when they went from 3.x to 4.x.

9. Dropping applications from the suite, more than once.

10. Dropping the mobile app.

11. A history of censoring people who complain.

12. A history of banning people who complain.

13. Afraid of negative feedback to the point where feedback section posts require moderator approval.

14. Changing their support policies from community, to private ticket, then back to community with private ticket with a more limited period.

15. Reversing their "free" claim after version 2.01. Matt Mecham said "They say 2.0 won't be free - and it will be."

Some of these are minor, some are major. In totality, it does not bode well for me. There are more I've heard over the years but don't recall offhand.

I had very high hopes for them after their big improvements in customer support the past year and a half (or so). Only to end up being censored recently when trying to respond to Charles essentially belittling me in a feedback thread. I know of other people who were also censored or outright banned for giving them feedback they didn't want to hear in that thread. I've seen many people over the years talk of being banned or censored there.

Id like to go through this, I appreciate the roundup. Im aware of half of these, the other half Id argue are simply the consequence of trying to innovate.

Why do we attack one group who constantly try to innovate and develop, while offer undying love and appreciation to another group who offers no new innovation. Some companies learn that they need to change their pricing model to support doing the product at all. A native app for example is so complicated to support, speaking from experience, that only those who have a reasonable income stream from their platform can afford it. That may change some day but Id say thats currently a fact.

And IPS costing $499? I mean if XenForo updated HALF as much as IPS Id argue they should charge the same. I mentioned this to Kier this multiple times, and I hope he does it. Sorry to say to those of you who want $40 updates and $10 add-ons. But the cost of living is going up. And I imagine that, perhaps, if XenForo was earning say three times what they are pulling in, they'd be able to build faster, at minimum. INB4 some guy argues me saying "No we're working on it, etc." , but if the money was better per license, so would the innovation and investment.

All in all I think cloud was good for XF, its just IPS had that how many years prior? Just not sure if its enough. We shall see.

 

[Dad.]

I've never seen that kind of pettiness from Xenforo staff - they deserve credit for taking flak and letting it stay - only stepping in if people went over the line with nastiness or other rule breaking.

Well, I've seen my fair share of pettiness. But in general, I'd agree. Though I cannot speak for IPS as Ive never experienced any issues there. I can say, overall, outside of the XenForo clique, XF indeed deserves credit for staying extremely democratized on their own forum. I don't even think I'd do that to be honest, there is something to keeping a discussion on a forum productive. I imagine it has caused some harm, these "where are xf 2.3" threads...

Regardless, I think IPS' new product is worth taking a serious look at for this kind of "federated" community. Its honestly precisely that, in my opinion, outside of a "for-profit" business building the base app. If they open-sourced it or something, shoot, that'd be interesting. But I imagine they'd have to earn back their investment at minimum before even considering that? Interesting either way.

 

[Suzanne O]

Ouch, that price tag is a little expensive for some forum sofware.
$499 bucks - too much money.
would be worse if that was 6 monthly.

 

[TPerry]

$499 bucks - too much money.

That's $499 for the first year, and the entire suite of products.
To compare:
XF Forum: $160
XFRM: $65
XFES: $55
XFMG: $65
So, for not even what you get with IPS (no commerce package or events/calendar), you are already in $345... and to be able to do similar with what you can with IPS Pages, I need 4 additional add-ons at a purchase price of $300... so now i'm into it at $645. If I need a calender... that's another $50. Need Groups? Add another $50 to the fee. So now we are at over $700.
With IPS, your yearly renewal is $199 for the entire suite. My XF yearly renewal(s) to get the equivalent (including the add-ons needed) run $260. Now, care to tell us which is actually more expensive?
I prefer XF myself... but it's not "because it's cheaper".

As to the topic... as I've said several times.. there are MUCH more important things they need to be concentrating on than a "fediverse"... many of them low-hanging fruit from the suggestions area.. some more "involved"... luckily most of the add-ons I need are from well known developers that have been around awhile.. but like all "individual" developers... things can happen and then suddenly they aren't there any longer.... so the dependency on major functionality on 3rd parties can be, at times, somewhat problematic, which is a core XF weakness.

 

[MaximilianKohler]

the dependency on major functionality on 3rd parties can be, at times, somewhat problematic, which is a core XF weakness

I can agree with that, and I mentioned that myself to them recently.

 

[MaximilianKohler]

It looks like Community Hive might be just what the doctor ordered? A reddit for forums? https://xenforo.com/community/threads/community-hive.216271/page-2#post-1644091

If they can get onto Google search results and then get a shorter domain name so people can search "hive query" that'll do it. It looks promising so far. I think they're just getting started up? @Community Hive

 

[sub_ubi]

It looks like Community Hive might be just what the doctor ordered? A reddit for forums? https://xenforo.com/community/threads/community-hive.216271/page-2#post-1644091

If they can get onto Google search results and then get a shorter domain name so people can search "hive query" that'll do it. It looks promising so far. I think they're just getting started up?

Already mentioned in this thread,

Bring Xenforo to the Fediverse

There seem to be two ways people are federating forums. I'd be happy with either one really, or a different method you dream up. I just like federation. 1) The singular timeline. Users "subscribe" to various forums: neogaf, ign, stevehoffman, the forum you run, et. al., and then popular threads...

xenforo.com

As I said, they should have used federation, which allows forum owners far more control over who and what they link with.

 

[benFF]

As I said, they should have used federation, which allows forum owners far more control over who and what they link with.

This only works if you aren't running advertising. I don't want my forum's posts visible on another site as that's losing me revenue, but just a snippet a'la Community Hive would be useful.

(Unless I'm misunderstanding the Fediverse?)

 

[sub_ubi]

This only works if you aren't running advertising. I don't want my forum's posts visible on another site as that's losing me revenue, but just a snippet a'la Community Hive would be useful.

(Unless I'm misunderstanding the Fediverse?)

Definitely possible with federation. discourse's activitypub plugin has snippets already.

 

[Kevin]

Just throwing this out there, not trying to single out any particular post or opinion in this thread...

When thinking of benefits of XenForo joining the fediverse, I think less of forum posts and more of stuff like profile posts (especially profile posts), PMs, and stuff like XFMG.

Think of a typical Twitter-like feed which started out life as a micro-blogging intention. The same type of feed from Twitter can be seen in Mastodon client, Facebook's Threads, and aggregators like IPS's Hive. Now compare that to XF's "Your news feed" page. You kind of get a similar feed of people you follow, including just snippets of posts, with the big difference being that the feed is only for other members of the same XF site you're currently visiting.

Throw in the activitypub and now think what your "Your news feed" page could be like if you were able to see recent activity from folks from other XF sites as well. Really it could be from any federated platform, like Mastodon, but to keep it simple let's assume that XF starts slowly by incorporating activitypub for just XF<->XF instances. You're visiting the forums of xenforo.com and that is your home "community" where you hang out and spend most of your time. But you're interested in following the activity of a member over at TAZ (just a random site I know that is using XF so as not to use my own sites as an example) named FuzzyDog. FuzzyDog is not a member of XenForo.com and spends most of their time at TAZ as their home community. From XenForo.com you choose to follow @fuzzydog@taz. Now when FuzzyDog posts something over on TAZ you see a snippet of the post in your new feed at XenForo.com, just a snippet, and clicking on the entry will take you over to TAZ to read the full post. When FuzzyDog adds a new Profile Post at TAZ you see it in your XF.com news feed. When FuzzyDog adds an image to XFMG at TAZ you see a thumbnail in your XF.com news feed and clicking on it takes you the XFMG item over at TAZ. Don't forget PMs. From XF.com you could send a PM to FuzzyDog at TAZ without ever leaving XF.com and vice versa.

There is no reason why the XF news feed page couldn't be restyled to look exactly like the feeds shown by Twitter, Threads, or Mastodon. Throw in activitypub and now your feed at your preferred XF home community could show activity from folks you follow at other XF sites. There would be zero need for aggregators like IPS's Hive.

One of things that Mastodon promotes, and generally works well, is the idea that each instance works as its own community and members can either follow just other members of that same community instance or they can follow people at other communities as well. Think of just about about topic and you can likely find a fediverse instance dedicated to that topic. Thrown in a federated XF and you get the best of both worlds, traditional forums that offer deep conversations while allowing communications with the outside world.

To keep it simple, I could see the devs starting with just XF<->XF instances, but if fully fleshed out just think of possibilities. You run a XF community and your members happen to be fans of Trek actors who are active in social media? No problem, your members could do everything they do now but also follow @georgetakei@universeodon.com to see his Mastodon posts in their XF news feed at your XF community. If Meta follows through on it's word, Threads will one day be federated as well.

Personally I would not be interested having full complete threads & posts federated but fediverse integration into members news feeds & PM's as described above? Take my money!

 

[tonmo]

Google had for a while a "discussions" link at the top where you could filter search results by various traditional discussion types. Apparently it didn't do well enough to keep around.

I remember it well, and it was at a time when forums were thriving. I don't think it was removed for the reason you cite; I think they realized they could shape traffic away from these little BB's of ours... we have Terms of Service, registered users, and pesky things like that which didn't jibe with their vision of their command of the web.

 

[MaximilianKohler]

Already mentioned in this thread,
As I said, they should have used federation, which allows forum owners far more control over who and what they link with.

Oh, Community Hive is Invision's website?

The one thing I'd be concerned about is the owner of the Hub deciding to censor/ban certain forums. But I suppose that may be a required trade-off to get it to the front of search engine results like with Reddit?

 

[MaximilianKohler]

Community Hive is not looking promising. They're starting off far more greedy than Reddit ended up after ~15 years https://xenforo.com/community/threads/community-hive.216271/post-1645077

 

[sub_ubi]

Yeah imagine that, forum people aren't excited about one company centralizing everything.

If anyone could host and curate their own "Hive", there'd be much more trust.