Over the years, forums did not really get smaller, so much as the rest of the internet just got bigger.

matrix isn’t a forum. it’s a chat.

pipeline to fascism

I assume they are just harvesting email addresses unless a very small site

There are so many niche forums.

Here’s one I found a while ago when I was looking at repairing an old electric fan I found: Antique Fan Collector’s Forum.

In the way that people would always add “reddit” to their searches, try just adding “forum”.

I’m really interested in the concept.

I would like to see community-oriented search engines. But I don’t know if “the community” is viable really. It would better be for communies. I just downloaded the browser extension and it lets you see the pages it is crawling; they are the sorts of things that would be of interest to a lemmy type community— a lot of nerd stuff. Which is of interest to me. That’s why I’m here. :)

What if I am in an online community interested in a different part of the web— say celebrity gossip and royal watching. A network of forums, comment sections, socials, chats etc with thousands of people who are at least casually interested and some hundred who are very motivated. Like everyone else the web is getting harder for us to navigate. How realistic would it be for us to spin up an instance of this to make our own community search engine? This community does not want to see a bunch of stackoverflow, gihubs, arxiv papers, tech news or the other stuff I am seeing float past me in the crawling extension.

It seems that the place where this kind of thing is somewhat documented would be https://book.mwmbl.org — but it’s pretty vague.

mumble is already the name of FLOSS voip software so they’re probably better off with the existing name. Which I don’t love on first glance but there’s probably some rationale for it.