Federated servers

originalsimba · Post by **originalsimba** » Sun Sep 23, 2018 10:00 pm

There hasn't been a significant improvement in social forums in years. Meanwhile Reddit has effectively destroyed the community at large, with the help of thousands of tiny servers which have divided topic-communities. The result is that people aren't really meeting or talking to the best of our capabilities.

I think we're in the middle of the evolution of forums. A big trend in open source software lately has been "Federated" services, allowing people to configure private servers which can communicate together.

There's a precedent for this. Back in the 1980s and 1990s we had something called "FIDOnet", which allowed single systems to share their posts globally.

I'm wondering if there are any plans currently to add some kind of Federation feature to phpBB, and if not, then I want to suggest that feature be added. This would allow people to have a single account on their favorite forum, while participating in topic-discussions across thousands of servers globally.

John connor · Post by **John connor** » Mon Sep 24, 2018 6:53 am

Just a quick thought on that idea seems to reek with hacking potential beyond belief.

There is this here: ideas

enter a valid email · Post by **enter a valid email** » Sun Sep 30, 2018 10:17 am

What is a Reddit?

AmigoJack · Post by **AmigoJack** » Mon Oct 01, 2018 9:10 am

I don't get what you want:

BBSes that sync with other BBSes, so they all have the same content on different installations? This is not practical because of the delay the syncing implies and the different forks it could bring, where merging conflicts will happen.
Multiple websites being displayed as one? Well, if the internet browser is unable to display them side by side (hello MDI which nowadays almost nobody supports anymore) then it could be done thru frames.
Have you even considered using web feeds? You could subscribe to multiple ones from different boards and your reader could still display all of them in one stream.

enter a valid email wrote: ↑
Sun Sep 30, 2018 10:17 am
What is a Reddit?

This happens when both people meet:

those using the internet without linking anything, and
those being unable to recognize names and searching them by issuing a search engine. Or Wikipedia.

Both things are really no black magic: use links when writing texts, and first search for yourself before asking.

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