MatchboxVagabond wrote:
Cornflake wrote:
Yes - a side-effect of it being built only with a desktop in mind (or at a push, a tablet).
The trouble with using it on a mobile is that everyone is given sausage fingers, or has to spend far too much time pinch-zooming to access stuff.
One of the great tragedies of the net is that XML or some other similar technology didn't take off to separate the content from the markup. If XML had taken off, it would have been a lot easier to get sites like this to run well on desktop and have a second set of markup to make them still work well on smaller screens.
The Open Source world offers several alternatives to a forum such as this, but they all have their issues. They try their best, but still "paint themselves into a corner" somehow. I looked long and hard into several such alternatives.
From a developer's viewpoint, Json supplanted XML for popularity. Is easier to parse, apparently.
From a system's-architecture view point, this separation of form from underlying content you speak of was achieved in the Mastodon world. ActivityPub is the underlying protocol, then servers like Mastodon and GotoSocial realistically implement that protocol, talking to each other. Alas, Mastodon is bloated (written in Ruby, is interpreted), but has decent moderation tools. Gotosocial is not bloated (written in Golang), but the moderation tools are rudimentary, and you'd really want them, because there are a lot of bots and spam incoming from other instances in the fediverse.
XMPP is heavily based in XML, but the chatrooms - while being praiseworthy for allowing encryption - sometimes have flaky delivery of messages, especially if some group member doesn't visit for multiple weeks. All clients are supposed to conform to the same standards, but alas, subtle differences in standards compliance make interoperation a few cards short of a full deck. I actually have a small-time Prosody XMPP server myself, and have been running it for about a year now.
Matrix is even less reliable. The chatrooms themselves fail in big way every few years or so, losing everything. And its slow and bloated, major portions being written in interpreted python.
For a Slack-like teamwork-focused experience (meant for teams working on larger projects, but break apart into smaller teams for threaded style chats), I hear Zulip is good, but is a bit bloated.
I mention this all to assure you that my recommendation of Flarum is not made in a wanton way. BTW: Flarum makes the claim that it can import from PHPBB
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"The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they've found it." - Terry Pratchett
01 Jun 2025, 2:20 pm
