It's a damn shame that Twitter got purchased by Elon. In reality, it was doing a fairly decent job for the size and scale it was and how relatively small the staff was in comparison. But now that Elon is going to slash labor down to damn near nothing and has insanely permissive policies towards racism, sexism, LGBTQ+-phobia ... I just don't know that it has much time left at all.

Back to the days of decentralized communication and isolated communities. But I guess in a lot of ways that's not so bad because lord knows I've gotten furious at Twitter shit because some algorithm decided I needed to see that in particular...

Large social platforms have always been destined to die. Too many people in one place is a problem and uncontrollable, both online and IRL. Myspace, Facebook, twitter, all had major problems that they can not control.

I mean you're not wrong about that. It does seem like there's a critical capacity above which the ability to moderate and control the creation is just gone. Even with AI and automated moderation, it seems like it causes more problems than it helps.

I do like things like IRC - or even this forum software - because it actually lets you have global oversight and then federated rooms. IRC has room ops, this forum has board-specific moderators, that sort of thing.

AI is far from perfect. It will never be able to moderate without understanding context.

I've used pretty much every forum software. PHPbb, vBulletin, and Joomla are my top 3. SM is #4.

That's exactly it. And context is something you can't truly train an AI to understand, at least, not yet. Might it be possible in the future? Sure. But not right now - not enough to trust it for content moderation for sure.

I use SMF because I'm familiar, though I have used PHPBB and vBulletin as well. Never dealt with Joomla, fo be fair.

PHPbb Icy Pheonix is pretty damn cool too. Its a modifed PHPbb but also doubles as a full website.

http://www.icyphoenix.com/

I do rather like what they're going for there, though if I was going to do CMS+Forum, I'd get the Wordpress plugin that provides forum functionality; it seems to me like Wordpress just has more extensibility in that particular combination. However, I like keeping the forum a separate thing from the site as any scripted site (like every CMS) seems to have massive performance losses even with caching when compared to bare HTML/CSS/JS code.

It would be nice if I was a more competent programmer of websites, but that's more from disuse than anything else. I guess this stuff will let me get back in the swing of it - and I did write a personal microblogging script in Perl just now that also writes out to an RSS file, so it's not like I've lost all of it.

Wordpress forums blow. It lacks so many basic features.

On the bright side the nostalgia factor of this place is nice.

Quote from: DoveWithScales on Jun 15, 2023, 01:34 PMOn the bright side the nostalgia factor of this place is nice.

It really is. It feels cozy and familiar to me as well, which makes me enjoy hanging out here. And the nice brown/coffee theme is calming too. (Well, default - I have other available themes.)