Yes - we know that G+ is shutting down.

@Jeremy_Williams my only complaint with Discourse is it doesn’t feature images and video prominently. The front page is a wall of text. Compare https://community.particle.io/ to https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/109127054924227823508 or https://www.reddit.com/r/FastLED/ or even https://www.facebook.com/groups/LEDSAREAWESOME/

I was also going to mention Discourse, because it’s one of the better forum systems I’ve seen in several years now. True, it doesn’t hilight images/video until you get down to the individual article level, but It’s still a nice system (modulo the possible GDPR issue mentioned above).

I also wanted to suggest Mastodon (https://mastodon.social / https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon). It has a presentation similar to Google+ or Twitter, and has a federated architecture which allows the ability to share content across servers.

I’ve been thinking about setting up a Mastodon server of my own, just because.

Reddit isn’t really good about browsing older threads. The sorting algorithm is pretty heavy towards the recent stuff and as you dive deeper into older things it doesn’t show much. Its an okay option. Its good in that it has a wiki and a sidebar with links and useful resources.

what about https://diasporafoundation.org/

Diaspora doesn’t appear to have anything in the way of decent mobile clients, so that’s pretty much out. I don’t want a twitter style thing - because I prefer the posts with comments model (like here, Facebook, or reddit) to the shouting into a void/at each other model like Twitter/mastodon.

Re discourse - honestly, second only to the library manager, their forums were one of the things I hated most about trying to support particle’s products.

@Daniel_Garcia Hi Daniel,
Actually i’m a php/webdeveloper and may we could think about moving the community to a own hosted community portal. Than we have the freedom to create the features which fits exactly for this community.
I know for sure the usability will increase.
I’m open to support in this. Please let me know!

I’ve done php/web development before, I’m very aware of what’s involved in self hosted, it’s part of why I’d really rather not - I also have yet to see a home grown community/discussion site that even comes close to something like that we had here - and I don’t want to waste time dealing with managing/hosting software - getting enough time to put into the library itself is enough of an issue - this goes doubly so for situations where we’d have to worry about GDPR/account security/etc… Spinning up our own software/self hosting is a path of last resort, honestly.

(See also why I host the library on github, vs. running my own git server or running my own hosted instance of gitlab)

@Daniel_Garcia I don’t see it that way.
Of course there are factors where you need to think about. All the factors that you mention is no issue for me and have experience with dealing with it.
Even with developing systems for communities.

I know for sure the usability, user-friendliness and efficiency will increase because your content can be placed and managed how it should be. You different types of content, messages, questions and sharings. I don’t have problems to take care about the factors which are important.

Again, as the person who will ultimately be responsible for managing and dealing with and keeping running said community - self hosting is among the last of the options that I want to look into. Having done this multiple times before, I know for sure that usability, user-friendliness, and efficiency are often the first things to go in home grown/home rolled community solutions, in spite of the best intentions/skills of all involved at the beginning.

Also - see again my requirement for good iOS/android clients - home grown systems are far far less likely to even remotely have that as an option (and no, “mobile web” does not count as a mobile client)

(Also - the first person to suggest Tapatalk gets banned… just kidding… mostly… but not really… tapatalk can go burn in the fire of a thousand suns)

I suggest http://discordapp.com as some of the others have. More engaging, easy to search. Tighter community. I feel like other forums like discourse and reddit hide most content and you need to search real good to find what you are looking for…

Take a look at Pleroma.social

It’s federated and pretty light weight. An example site here https://not.unixporn.pro/main/all

Looks a bit like a twitter feed but click on the + in the top right to open the conversation between each post.

You would require to self host as far as I can tell.

Have you looked into whether WordPress.com might offer a theme and feature set that would be acceptable?http://WordPress.com

Have you looked at MeWe? I finally got around to checking it out, and from what I just saw in a Raspberry Pi group I joined, the mobile interface is very similar to G+.

@dougal One of the Ham Radio groups on google+ has just setup a MeWe.

@dougal Speaking as someone who runs a bevvy of Wordpress based sites, I don’t recommend this route. True, there are quite a few options, layouts, responsive templates and the like out there, but the combination of required hands-on management of such a site as well as having to deal with hosting, makes it a massive pain in the butt to any one (or even a handful of people) to want to deal with.

@Christopher_Kirkman1 I was speaking specifically of http://wordpress.com, as a managed service, not as self-hosted.

As someone who generally detests web apps, I find the Discourse mobile experience to be… well, fine actually. The only forum-like thing with functional mobile clients that I’m aware of is Reddit.

(Discord is the worst of both worlds, its “native” apps are Electron, and as Dan notes it’s a Slack-like, not a forum-like.)