Back to Community Basics
I’m moving my community engagement from Discord, Matrix and the Fediverse to a forum. Please come along for the ride!
To cut some of the admin overhead I currently have with maintaining some of the community services for fab.industries, I am consolidating these services in a new place. For this, I have set up a Discourse forum at forum.fab.industries. This will be the future destination for comments on my writing, podcasts, videos and my novel project. You can also use the forum to socialise with other readers, listeners and viewers of my stuff.
This means that, in the following weeks, I will shut down my public Discord sever, my Matrix installation and my Mastodon server. If you are on the Discord, use Matrix to comment on my blog articles or podcasts or a following me in the Fediverse, please consider signing up for the forum. But even if you don’t sign up, the public nature of the forum means you’ll be able to read discussions happening about my stuff. That’s one of the reasons I’m going back to something as old-school as a forum. I think I simply prefer the kind of discourse that happens when things are public. And I don’t have to answer the same question multiple times, but instead can link to previous answers. Another reason is that I’ve run many community systems in my time and I think the old Linux Outlaws forum was the best – and I want to try to go back in that direction.
If you’re wondering why I’m not moving everything to the Fediverse, the reason is simply that the adoption isn’t there. After several years of running a Mastodon server, I don’t see enough people using the Fediverse to make it worth the effort for me. I also don’t see that changing any time soon. Additionally, I have some other issues with the Fediverse, some of which I’ve written about previously. Let’s not get into that here.
TL; DR: The forum is the new place to comment on my stuff and hang out with me digitally. The Discord, Matrix and Mastodon servers will be shut down in the coming weeks.
This is not negotiable. I am running these services for free and I’m administering them on my own time.
Anyway, I hope you like the new forum! I’m pretty excited about it. If you have ideas for improvements, new categories or features I should implement, please use the feedback forum to tell me about them.
Comment on this post in our forum → Header image credit: June Wong