#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?
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.