#Tapatalk was a dominant app in the pre-social media days when discussions took place on all different forums and message board sites across the internet, not centralized platforms like today. Tapatalk provided a centralized way to subscribe to all those discussions on different servers, post and comment freely, without logging into each forum site directly.
Since then #Reddit became the centralized and dominant place to engage around niche topics, killing that diverse ecosystem of forums. I’d like to see the #Fediverse become and equivalent “central” location for finding and engaging with niche topics while remaining decentralized by its nature.
We still have lots of forums running on open source #Discourse software, but we don’t have an easy way to connect and engage all those communities back into #Lemmy, #ActivityPub, and the #Fediverse to make them findable with the same ease Reddit provides.
What’s the best way to unify the #Fediverse with the existing forum communities that exist outside the platform web?
Neat. But it’s not pre social media. Social media has been around since the 1980s.
The fediverse has become the central hub for it all due to its nature. Any forums or whatever which want to join in and be a part of it are free to do so. It could perhaps be made easier, but that depends on the technical details of the protocols involved which are still hard to understand.
That’s why I alternately call it the “platform web” in which social media stopped running on open and interoperable protocols and started being walled gardens on commercial platforms.
And to your other point - it shouldn’t be solely up to forum admins to opt-in to the Fediverse, end users should be able to subscribe to the forums they belong to with Fedi-powered tools.
The Fediverse could and should be the place where all those things can converge but I’m pointing out that it currently is failing to be that.
I used to love the newsgroups and what I liked about reddit was its similarity to it in some ways. this is even more so because rec, alt, etc where in some ways like instances.