this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
222 points (98.3% liked)
Fediverse
28494 readers
551 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What is Discourse? Love the name of anything that references gives a nod to The Dialectic but I'm cautious...
An old style forum service with a modern twist, made by one of the founders of Stack Overflow
Specifically its co-creator was Jeff Atwood, who is also the writer of coding horror and recently posted a pretty good endorsement of Mastadon and other non-twitter services.
He was actually one of only a dozen or so people I followed on very early twitter, before losing interest in the bullshit on there by 2010 or so and moving to Reddit.
Where/how I can haz?
You can either rent an instance, or run your own.
I'd rather not host anything, I more meant like participate in a Lemmy.world type deal?
Ah, okay. That's not how that works, forums are usually used for specific contexts, like support from a specific company.
As an example, Guild Wars 2 for the longest time - don't know whether they still do - ran a forum that was a highly customized version of Discourse. Turtle Rock also used it for their support forum. Fairphone's forums are entirely on Discourse (and it's pretty obvious in their case as they use a quite vanilla installation).
Thank you for enlightening me, I didn't really get it when I first encountered it. Like, how's that different from like ZenDesk?
Its not proprietary software and not owned by a for profit company. Also because of the previous things, you can heavily modify it to fit the thing your forum is about.
That is very cool, I will learn more and advocate for them going forward once I better understand the standard