Oddbean

As a follow-up to https://mastodon.social/@danluu/109798007902048311, I wonder why there isn't a serious, well-funded, attempt to create a modern forum If you look at Wikipedia's list of forum software, it's all ancient except discourse, and discourse seems unlikely to ever be something great for users Its performance is famously terrible. People often point out how unusable it is unless you have a fast phone and the founder's response to this has been to rant about how Qualcomm sucks and need to make faster processors https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/062/668/520/262/408/original/c4f61ff3cc9eae6a.png

Its backend performance also appears to be quite bad, e.g., they banned Bing from crawling them because they couldn't handle the 0.5 QPS of load that Bing was sending their way: https://twitter.com/danluu/status/981992814824378369. But, computer performance continues to improve and discourse will probably be usable on a cheap phone within a decade and maybe servers will also become fast enough that they'll be able to handle 0.5 QPS of load. The bigger issue is that the design is strongly anti-user in a lot of ways, e.g.,

@04c5d43c'll note that the issue with using Wikipedia as a source here is that forum software isn't really exciting for the kind of sources Wikipedia requires and lack of editors without conflicts of interest. For example, NodeBB was on this list for a bit, but was deleted for not having an article I think, and the article about it was deleted for lack of notability (since other than some blogs and what they publish themselves there aren't many sources). Flarum seems to be hanging onto their own article despite not citing much besides their own sites and GitHub (and the author disclaiming having a conflict of interest due to being a contributor to Flarum), but they're also absent from the comparison. I'll note that while both are also good modern options (and I personally preferr either to Discourse), both also use a lot of JS, so I'm not sure if they address your main concern.