The Todoist folks also make Twist, which is in this family and looks simple and pretty nice. Not sure why it has so little uptake. https://twist.com/home
Ask HN: User communities that aren't Discord?
51–60 of 72 posts
Re: Ask HN: User communities that aren't Discord?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me an old fashioned forum would be something like phpBB. Discourse-style forums are relatively new and IMHO much worse in terms of UI. I really don't get the appeal.
What don't you like about Discourse? I grew up in the phpbb/vBulletin era, and even back then it was a common complaint when Discourse first came out. Never quite understood the hate myself, but I'd love to hear your thoughts?
Frankly, I don't like almost anything about it. The dynamic loading/endless scrolling instead of pages, the silly navigation bar, the "x time later" instead of the exact date and time, the narrow post width...
I get "dumbed-down, mobile first" vibes from the UI, kinda like Twitter, which is the last thing I want for a forum with thoughtful discussions. And it's also more bloated/slower than classic forums (https://danluu.com/slow-device/).
I think the best forum software right now is XenForo. But even phpBB and many similar free alternatives (MyBB, SMF,...) are better than Discourse. Those can also be heavily customized (might be true for Discourse too, but I doubt it would improve it much).
Re: Ask HN: User communities that aren't Discord?
#53Flarum is a really nice open source forum https://flarum.org/
I've been keeping my eye out for something more responsive (in an AJAX-like way) than phpBB, but less bloated than Discourse (as it's written in ruby). Something Open Source, decently low-effort to maintain (I like Debian), could run on a Raspberry Pi 5 for a small community, and doesn't require docker. This might be suitable. Thanks for the endorsement.
Re: Ask HN: User communities that aren't Discord?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
What don't you like about Discourse? I grew up in the phpbb/vBulletin era, and even back then it was a common complaint when Discourse first came out. Never quite understood the hate myself, but I'd love to hear your thoughts?
Frankly, I don't like almost anything about it. The dynamic loading/endless scrolling instead of pages, the silly navigation bar, the "x time later" instead of the exact date and time, the narrow post width... I get "dumbed-down, mobile first" vibes from the UI, kinda like Twitter, which is the last thing I want for a forum with thoughtful discussions. And it's also more bloated/slower than classic forums ( https://d…
I see. Thank you for sharing! I'm not affiliated with the forum software, but I do manage a discourse instance at work and was just curious about your UX thoughts.
I appreciate the details!
I don't like infinite scrolling either, and I agree that there's a lot of wasted space in the default layout.
Re: Ask HN: User communities that aren't Discord?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
What don't you like about Discourse? I grew up in the phpbb/vBulletin era, and even back then it was a common complaint when Discourse first came out. Never quite understood the hate myself, but I'd love to hear your thoughts?
Frankly, I don't like almost anything about it. The dynamic loading/endless scrolling instead of pages, the silly navigation bar, the "x time later" instead of the exact date and time, the narrow post width... I get "dumbed-down, mobile first" vibes from the UI, kinda like Twitter, which is the last thing I want for a forum with thoughtful discussions. And it's also more bloated/slower than classic forums ( https://d…
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Re: Ask HN: User communities that aren't Discord?
#56Zulip is a pretty nice option https://zulip.com/
https://github.com/zulip/zulip-terminal/releases/expanded_as...
Does Discord even have a command-line client?
Re: Ask HN: User communities that aren't Discord?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me an old fashioned forum would be something like phpBB. Discourse-style forums are relatively new and IMHO much worse in terms of UI. I really don't get the appeal.
What don't you like about Discourse? I grew up in the phpbb/vBulletin era, and even back then it was a common complaint when Discourse first came out. Never quite understood the hate myself, but I'd love to hear your thoughts?
dont like the lack of hierarchical structure
Re: Ask HN: User communities that aren't Discord?
#58Zulip is a pretty nice option https://zulip.com/
Thoughts on this comment about it? https://programming.dev/comment/11056421
Re: Ask HN: User communities that aren't Discord?
#59The big problem Discord solves is that nobody wants to create YetAnotherForumAccount.
If only we could standardize on a federated SSO solution for all sites.
Re: Ask HN: User communities that aren't Discord?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me an old fashioned forum would be something like phpBB. Discourse-style forums are relatively new and IMHO much worse in terms of UI. I really don't get the appeal.
What don't you like about Discourse? I grew up in the phpbb/vBulletin era, and even back then it was a common complaint when Discourse first came out. Never quite understood the hate myself, but I'd love to hear your thoughts?
Discourse is written in ruby, and it's not as performant as I would like. Discourse isn't really suitable for running on, say, a Raspberry Pi 5. It's even somewhat sluggish-feeling at times, running on a 4ish year old PC as a server (which my own org does, in a Docker container in Debian). We have a low user count, so that sluggishness seems unreasonable.