Services like eBay are part platform, part people. eBay’s people do a lot behind the scenes to ensure it runs smoothly and ethically… AND they take a significant chunk of the proceeds. You could put up some free software that does auctions but you wouldn’t have all those high paid security and trust workers working for you.

Neat. But it’s not pre social media. Social media has been around since the 1980s.

That’s why I alternately call it the “platform web” in which social media stopped running on open and interoperable protocols and started being walled gardens on commercial platforms.

And to your other point - it shouldn’t be solely up to forum admins to opt-in to the Fediverse, end users should be able to subscribe to the forums they belong to with Fedi-powered tools.

The Fediverse could and should be the place where all those things can converge but I’m pointing out that it currently is failing to be that.

Not a stupid question, but I should clarify that I’m approaching this as a reader, not an admin. I’m trying to find a reading solution that encompasses forums running on Discourse, NodeBB, and whatever else older platforms might still have thriving communities around topics I’m interested in.

I found the DiscourseHub app that lets you browse and subscribe to a wide cross section of communities powered by Discourse, but no NodeBB or others. The solution I’m envisioning would be like that but agnostic of platforms.

I like the idea of choosing to focus deeply on enriching the content in certain communities. I think a huge tool in that fight is carefully using an “RSS to Lemmy” bot to pipe good quality feeds of relevant content into communities for further discussion around. If there’s an authoritative blog site that reliably writes good content that’d be relevant to a subLemmy audience, it might be a welcome addition.

Ember Knights, TMNT Splintered Fate, Children of Morta, Absolum