Creating a new Community for Creatives/Tinkerers - (Plans to Federate)

[unfinishedprojects@piefed.zip]

Hey everyone, the attached link is my write-up about the plans for a new community I am trying to get established.
Since I know a lot of people don't actually follow links to read articles, I'll copy and paste some stuff here:

My ideal for this platform is to build a space that values creativity, learning, and working/tinkering at various projects - whatever that may be, from arts and crafts, to software development, to 3D printing, to scientific research. As the forum title suggests, "UnfinishedProjects" is meant to bring people together to share what they are working on, provide a network to collaborate and work together, and just overall enjoy the journey and make some friends along the way.

The forum is not meant to be a "hyper-niche" space, but instead a place for creatives and tinkerers (the kind of people who always have three half-finished projects sitting on their desk) to come together. While the forum has a slight leaning towards the open source and Creative Commons space, to support the "Libre" community - it's meant to be more of a general philosophy rather than a strict gate-keeping measure.

To initially get started, I am using a free hosting platform, but as soon as I am sure the community has enough members who are committed to the community, I plan on transferring over to nodeBB which has native support for Fediverse integration.

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Also, addressing the questions of "why not just create a Lemmy/PieFed instance":

Let me start off by saying that I recognize that mega-forum platforms like Reddit, Lemmy, and PieFed exist, and serve an important function. While Lemmy and PieFed have yet to gain traction, I personally hope that they might eventually mature enough to replace Reddit - but as of now, Reddit is a central platform that allows users to find almost any sub for a random topic, and get questions answered from other people who are also interested in that specific niche. This is great, and I think this is where mega-forums excel.

However, I feel that individual forums (like this one that I am trying to create) have very much died off, with the exception of some already well established and long lived ones (BoardGameGeek, I'm looking at you). What I think a personal forum like this has to offer that mega-forums do not, is the permanence and commitment from its members - generally leading to a smaller but more tightly-knit community and network of individuals. On mega-forums like Reddit, it is so easy for members to move from one sub to another, and get lost in the "social-media" type of posts and memes that detract from the intent of any one specific forum.

Additionally, subs on these platforms are often hyper-niche, which can offer a lot of benefits, but a traditional forum may provide a better place to bring people together from various skill sets, interests, and hobbies to share and encourage one another.

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If this is something that you think you might be interested in supporting, I kindly ask that you might be willing to join our community and help us build a place that we can all be proud to participate in.

I hope you all have a great day!
Stay safe in these crazy times ✊

-Anthony

[hendrik@palaver.p3x.de]

NodeBB would be a good choice. It brings together both worlds. It is a more traditional forum, like you envision it to be. And it's perfectly able to speak ActivityPub and interconnect with other platforms like PieFed and Lemmy.

[unfinishedprojects@piefed.zip]

Yeah, that's the plan :) just trying to see if I can get people initially interested and active in the community before I take the leap to actually paying for and setting up an entire nodeBB site. This free hosting option makes it easy to see if it's even worth pursuing further. But yeah, I'm excited to hopefully get transferred over to nodeBB, seems like a solid forum software, especially for modern day internet needs with their group chat capability for more of a "discord" like experience for people who are actively collaborating.

[hendrik@palaver.p3x.de]

It's tricky to get these things started. I mean I'm not an expert on community building, so don't take advice from me... But yeah. You're competing against Discord, Reddit, the Fediverse... Many people are on Matrix, somewhere in the Github and Codeberg discussions. Some projects have Discourse forums, like Home Assistant, NixOS, Godot, Arduino...

Unfortunately Discourse is quite a resource hog. And not interconnected. So I think you already picked some solid options with Flarum and NodeBB.

I see somewhat of the same issue. The Threadiverse is very nice. It'd be a good fit IMO. But most people use it more for social-media style interactions. I rarely get good conversations going about electronics, microcontrollers, and the tinkerer stuff I'm interested in. And there's several reasons for that. I think the situation with scattered (Discourse) forums isn't good either. That works if you have an existing community, like a bigger project, or a hackerspace, or a Youtuber and their followers. Other than that it's a pain to use, because it's just many separate places. And I'd rather have everything combined, so I can easily navigate, like here, or on Discord where I'll get notifications and can jump everywhere with a few clicks.

Not sure if it's a good idea to launch some temporary / intermediary stage and then nuke it and have everyone sign up again... That could make people be less motivated to join right now. But hey, I guess you'd need to start somewhere. And figuring things out as you go is alright. I'll sign up, and lurk a bit.

[unfinishedprojects@piefed.zip]

You make some great points all around, and I pretty much agree all around. Of course, it's very possible that this falls through and fails to establish for those same reasons you mentioned - but I figured it doesn't hurt to give it a solid effort and try. As mentioned in some other comments across different crossposts, I think I will most likely need to make the transition to the permenant platform earlier rather than later, as soon as I'm somewhat confident that this experiment is has a decent chance of gaining members. (I'm thinking I just need to get a small handful of committed members first, then work together to establish the new platform).

Anyways, I greatly appreciate your willingness to join even if it's just to lurk a while :). Of course if you have feedback or ideas I'm always open to constructive criticism.

[hendrik@palaver.p3x.de]

Giving things a solid try is very much appreciated 😆

Yes. Fingers crossed. And don't let people like me talk you out of what you want to do. I mean nobody knows in advance, what kind of path needs to be taken. And the path is gonna be riddled with issues, decisions to be made and things to be learned. There's no way around that.

[sk@utsukta.org]

It would be a wonderful community and i'd love to be part of it. I am on hubzilla which implements groups in a different way than lemmy/piefed. In hubzilla we make a post by sending a DM to the community address and the community then automatically reposts it to their followers. I miss this kind of privacy while participating in forums on lemmy/piefed where i have to tag them publically and my post gets delivered to everyone and is always public.

Does nodebb enable private participation?

[unfinishedprojects@piefed.zip]

Ooh, I wish I could answer your question, but I'm not familiar with hubzilla, and I'm still researching nodeBB. I'm not 100% sure if your question, but nodeBB does have private messaging and private group chats, but I'm not sure about the actual privacy through federation.

I'm open into looking into other options though, so if you find out more or other alternatives that would still fit into the goals/intent if the community - if be interested in seeing what you find. I'll do a bit of research into hubzilla too.

Also, I'd love it if you joined the current (temporary) forum we have right now and helped us build up the community - I'm really going to need a few solid "founding" members (for lack of a better word) to help get this community off the ground and established. I'm always open to ideas and feedback. The more people showing interest, the closer I am to pulling the trigger on setting up the permanent site through a VPS.

[julian@activitypub.space]

Hi both. Hubzilla and NodeBB federation is public only, as there is no concensus on how to achieve private federated group discussions.

Hubzilla does something called Conversation Containers. NodeBB doesn't support that at all yet.

Operative word: yet.

But you should be able to talk to the NodeBB forums from Hubzilla.

[unfinishedprojects@piefed.zip]

Thank you so much for chiming in with your wisdom :D

[sk@utsukta.org]

In my opinion hubzilla can be a good option to try out too, it offers wikis, webpages, chatrooms which can be useful when building a community and managing a group knowledgebase. When i used to participate on reddit diy communities their wiki feature were very helpful and something i wanted to see here on the fedi.

In addition its nomadic identity features and account portability ensures that your community isnt tied down to a particular host.

The only downside is it has a steep learning curve and takes some digging into.

[julian@activitypub.space]

If you are setting up a self-hosted NodeBB, there won't be any need to start over if you switch to our paid hosting.

We can take a database export from your existing install and migrate it onto our platform.

As for costs, feel free to reach out to us, and we will see what we can do. We have a program for non-profits and charities. While that doesn't always extend to hobby forums, it never hurts to ask. Reference this thread when you reach out 🙂