I mostly lurk here, and I know we’ve had this discussion come up a number of times since Discord’s age verification changes were announced, but I figured this video offers value for the walkthrough and comparative analysis. Like me, the video authors aren’t seasoned self-hosters, and I’ve still got a lot to learn. Stoat and Fluxer both look appealing to me for my needs, but Stoat seemingly needs self-hosted servers to route through their master server (unless I’m missing something stupid) and I replicated the 404 for Fluxer’s self-hosting documentation seen in the video, so it’s looking like I’m leaning toward a Matrix server of some kind. Hopefully everyone looking for the Discord exit ramp is closer to finding it after this video.
Old fashioned forums are old fashioned. Circular logic but there’s a lot holding them back.
How hard would it be to create an open source identity token that would allow user authentication on any forum or site that will accept it?
Something with a public/private encryption system to authenticate users without the content needing to be federated.
You’ve got some points but I would argue that antiquated UI will be what saves the Internet. Keeping out bots and AI scrapers with good old fashioned phpBBS systems that have been around for twenty years will be our clean data as we build systems outside of AI and the techbro properties.
I don’t see how web 1.0 style sites are resistant to AI or bots. It’s kind of the opposite. Bots/AI are really good at pure text stuff.
Because they block access without signing up.
I’ve also always liked how old school forums are structured. Nice, neat categories and most active/recent stuff on top.