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Neat. But it’s not pre social media. Social media has been around since the 1980s.

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.

Not a stupid question, but I should clarify that I’m approaching this as a reader, not an admin. I’m trying to find a reading solution that encompasses forums running on Discourse, NodeBB, and whatever else older platforms might still have thriving communities around topics I’m interested in.

I found the DiscourseHub app that lets you browse and subscribe to a wide cross section of communities powered by Discourse, but no NodeBB or others. The solution I’m envisioning would be like that but agnostic of platforms.

Real interoperability should allow the publisher (them) to set the level of access (public/private) to their content AND THEN the end user (you and me) to choose the kind of client experience we use to consume that content so we can customize the user experience to our needs. That’s how email and websites work. If a forum software exposed its posts and comments to the open web or RSS (or even just to logged in users), anyone should be able to open that content with the browser or app of their choice. Commercial social platforms have distorted this very basic relationship between publishers and users but we can never forget that is the way it should be.

Couldn’t a sub moderator regulate that in real time though? Ideally they shouldn’t have to do too much of that, but in my experience many RSS feeds have a consistent volume of posts per day. I’m talking about choosing 1-2 feeds that post under 10 posts per day total, and an attentive mod could kibosh up to 3-4 if they’re not relevant to what the community wants. Could even put keyword filters on the feeds so relevant posts never hit the sub in the first place.

I mean… The other reason to start in a niche is because one is interested in a narrow subset of the wider topic and wants to avoid the bigger, louder, more mainstream content that dominates the conversation. I get that going up to c/games might have more content but if it’s all about Call of Duty and Madden Football, it’s not for me.

Then we have a real chicken/egg problem - not enough content to discuss and nobody discussing it.

Take a specific c/ like /us_news as an example. The feed is largely made up of timely posts from specific US news sites that are presumably acceptable to members. They can read a digest of the day’s news and react.

Then take a niche example like c/roguelites. There’s maybe one blog about roguelite games I know of where every post is worth reading, rogueliker.com. In Reddit that blog has its own sub but reposts almost every post into r/roguelites. No one minds because (a) the content is good and (b) there’s enough other organic activity in that sub that it doesn’t feel like it’s all just that blog. We have less organic activity overall here, but I’m trying to think of ways to spur engagement so communities have something going on in them.

I like the idea of choosing to focus deeply on enriching the content in certain communities. I think a huge tool in that fight is carefully using an “RSS to Lemmy” bot to pipe good quality feeds of relevant content into communities for further discussion around. If there’s an authoritative blog site that reliably writes good content that’d be relevant to a subLemmy audience, it might be a welcome addition.