Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

Well, gitlab is way better. Github is the Facebook of developers.

Honestly, I like how Guilded has set it up but not how they seem to 1) not be developing the app that quickly and 2) not communicating much with their users.

They have separate channel types, where one is a chat channel (like Discord and other chat groups: a linear chat stream) and another as a forum channel (that has unexpanded topics that when clicked show a linear chat stream, also able to pin certain topics to the top).

What I like about it is that I can find slack/discord/group text channels to really frustrate me when I've missed some things. Seems very hard to sometimes get caught up on what people are saying, often many conversations happening at the same time, and having to scroll back a lot to figure out where it began. Ah! That may be it, channels don't seem to have a start, so I find I try to search for the beginning and get overwhelmed trying to see how the conversation "started." Whereas with the post/topic style channel that most forums have, it's quite easy for me to see where the conversation started (at least where this branch of it did) and don't feel the stress to go all the way back.

FB seems to have a similar post/topic style organization, yet has the posts expanded so one doesn't just sees the title, sees the whole post, which can make it hard to scan to see which to read. HN seems to have a similar post/topic style organization, yet, as FB, lacks many of the forum features or doesn't seem to do them well, like sorting/searching/filtering/pinning/moderation/etc.

I basically kinda dream of Guilded but with faster development, doubled or tripled down focus on their forum channel, and a superpowered member directory.

> I'm working on a topical chat site

I checked it out and I like the look. Seems like HN or reddit in a way, but without the indented threads and just having a linear chat form. If a lot of people chat on each post, I think I may get similarly lost to Discord. I do have a few ideas that popped into my mind that excited me, please feel free to take them or leave them:

1) Embed the article/content directly in the post column? Not sure how technologically feasible/legal it'd be, but I'd love to have one site that brings content in reader mode and then having that chat column next to it, so that I could read and then comment in the same spot. I don't like clicking away and coming back, especially with the columnar setup, I think I'd love the full side-by-side.

2) Somehow limiting who can type in the chat column, maybe per article or per community or something. I think I've dreamed of having a place where I can watch 2 people chat, maybe 3. I think conversations can get quite diluted/convoluted with more people and I love the idea of just reading what two people think, especially ones I respect, especially who may have expertise on a specific topic. Maybe it could be less of a pure open-to-everyone chat, and maybe has separate 1-to-1 chats in there about the topic. I dunno. Something about me would love to see a 1-1 chat of you and your friend talking about Incubus, and then maybe a former Incubus person and another famous rocker talking about their reflection on this, etc. Perhaps this is too out there and not clear enough, not sure.

Anyway, would love to chat more with you on your endeavor if you'd like to :-)

Hopefully we'll eventually have better bridges for going between the live discussion and the persisted artifacts. Discord has lightweight threads now, so a thread issue/discussion bridge like https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/12340 is viable there.

Ok cool set up a forum. Who's going to moderate it to handle the tons of spam it will immediately receive? Will it be the same person keeping security updates current? They're going to be busy doing that and fielding support requests because someone forgot a password or someone is being a jerk to them.

I'd love for FOSS projects to avoid things like Discord but they choose free managed services for a reason. Unless someone wants to dedicate a fair amount of effort to running a forum, IRC channel(s), or other service it's a big ask of a bunch of part time contributors.

Running a forum is usually orthogonal to developing some software. It's a lot of extra effort for minimal benefit for a "community".

if OAuth had really succeeded at its goals and really federated authentication I'd be more interested in it, but no I'm not really comfy attaching my google account to random shitty things either because then we get into real name disclosure and such.

There's effectively only a few SSO providers that are viable to use on most of the internet (google, github, microsoft mostly) and they're all attached to more personal information than the forums were to begin with.

I do really wish federated identity had gotten off the ground the way it was promised though. That would be a better world.