@xianc78 @corfiot @PurpCat The kinds of sus ideologues that managed to take over the moderation of community sites and the kinds of sus ideologues that zerg-rushed the imageboards had completely opposing ideologies but managed to achieve the same goal: driving people into the arms of social media.

@WALFTEAM @xianc78 @corfiot many didn't even take over
They were just so bad people wanted to bolt

@PurpCat @xianc78 @corfiot That is absoloutely true. It still represents a shortsightedness on the part of the people who bolted; the burden of this mistake is evenly distributed.

In many cases the takeover was mental; as we well know there were only a very few cases of people being injected into communities or being flipped by police contact. Most people who went through these major ideological shifts freely chose to become that way, and the higher-up they were when they changed, the more effective they were in effecting change.

@WALFTEAM @xianc78 @corfiot something awful with low-t appointing the catladies, moots final days, and reddits "we can replace mods" policies are the few exceptions to that rule and I wasn't around sa so the first could have been the pillhead thinking that a catlady was a good idea to be a mod.

Many of them are like Tyler Malka with NeoGAF where he's been called a snake due to his 180 on rules and even registrations when the woke audience dumped his site.

I should add too, what xianc is talking about has absolutely 100% nothing to do with culture war bullshit and everything to do with powertripping moderators who in classic "janny" fashion would use the forum to power trip all to have a false meaning in life while also having a very unsatisfying real life to say the least.

For example so many old school forums with shit admins would janny you for bumping an old thread or "necroposting" or discussing stuff they merely thought was illegal.

It's why say PokeCommunity has a thriving community compared to BMGf or SPPf, because they would talk about something banned on both (romhacks/fangames). Ditto with sites like Project Pokemon that focused on reverse engineering.

@PurpCat @xianc78 @corfiot Noted. Perhaps the real problem is that it's getting harder to just make a better site when shit does go bad.

@WALFTEAM @PurpCat @Corfiot Yes and no. Forums are simple enough to be hosted on a shared hosting service, unlike Fediverse instances which are better off (or out right required) being hosted on a VPS. Even the most popular modern forum software, XenoForo is still written in PHP. And many hosts these days have autoinstallers for packages like phpBB and WordPress, so you don't need to learn things like SSH or FTP.

Granted, I have never actually hosted a forum (outside of testing forum software that I wrote myself almost a decade ago and have lost the source code to since), but I think the biggest problem that forum admins had to deal with is spam. I remember phpBB having the most basic captchas (if you can even call them that). It could be simple as clicking on a checkbox. And I remember back when Reddit was becoming more popular, the common argument of hosting their discussions on there over a forum was the spam issue.

Though, even with basic captchas, you can still handle the spam problem with an active moderation team, filtering out certain email domains (.biz domains are known for spam and abuse), among other things.

Other than that, you have to deal with eventually having to change servers or upgrade your hosting plan if your forum is popular for a long time. It's probably why most forums required you to upload images to a separate server like Photobucket instead of uploading images directly.

The only fedi software stacks written in PHP are GS V2 (old lol) and Friendica.

Based, gonna switch to them

Friendica is the only one still being maintained. It's kind of jank but Peter Wayland uses it.
https://libranet.de/profile/peter_weyand/

@PurpCat @Corfiot @Kirino I would totally write my own implementation in PHP if I was bothered to look through ActivityPub. But I personally would rather stick to something simple like twtxt.

No joke at least one GS tut said "yeah this is good for shared hosting". Of course nowadays shared hosting is less trendy but some providers are like that.

and maybe something else fairly soon, of what GNU social v3 should have been.

For the newcomer it must have simply seemed a simpler experience. Not much discovery to worry about, multiple "forums" on one site and so on. I think people never think about moderation. Well. Not until they need it. To most, moderation is something that just magically happens. This is still the case but some parts, especially the younger people, are beginning to realize this via the censorship mainstream social media do.