This could be an incredible development (or at least the start of something incredible :-). Right now discourse instances are maybe the highest quality online meeting and discussion places on the internet but they are all separate islands. Some sort of federation among them and maybe with other type of servers (when it makes sense) would open a new window. Watching this with some excitement!
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).
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.
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