Hey comrades, today I have a special announcement to make!

u/Makan and I are currently working on creating a old bulletin board-style forum board for communists and Marxist-Leninists, in a similar vein to this website. However, this site will be based more around slower-paced and intimate discussions of theory, history and current events, instead of the more fast-paced tone of Lemmygrad.

For those who aren’t familiar with bullet board systems (or BBS forums), here is an idea of what they generally look like: https://famiboards.com/

We plan on having our own communist forum look very similar to this one with due time.

Our goal with this forum board is to generate deep, thoughtful discussions about everything pertaining to advancing the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism, and we are excited to eventually be able to share this project with the rest of you comrades once it is ready!

We will almost certainly be relying on additional volunteers to help run this site once it is made public, but for now, it is a two-person job. We will keep the updates rolling on our next move.

Now is the time to ask any and all questions you have regarding this project. We are excited to get everyone as engaged with this as possible!

  • hkto@lemmygrad.ml
    2·
    3 years ago

    Questions, I have many!

    • Have you considered building it as a Lemmy client rather than a standalone forum?

    See: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/client_development/custom_frontend.html

    In terms of what would be different, UX could focus on eg, surfacing longer comments first, presenting each comment as a thread within a category (which would be a post on Lemmy rather than a community). It could even be a “sticky” forum UX pointed at a single post or set of posts, for instance. That might promote the kind of long running discussions you’re looking for.

    • What features will differentiate it from eg, Discourse? Or other existing forum software?

    • Do you have any plans for helping people make and plan groups?

    Longer discussions are, I’d posit, more a result of culture than interface. The cultural enablers here would be things like groups with meetings that offer interaction centred around ML topics. It seems reasonable to assume that better tools for this might help with that change.

    Just thoughts - it is awesome that you’re motivated enough to do this!

    • Comrade AppleDash@lemmygrad.mlOP
      2·
      3 years ago

      Glad you have so many questions!

      1. We might do a forum on Lemmy in the future, though neither of us are particularly skilled at working with Lemmy’s code at the moment so we’re resorting to a different hosting service for now. ProBoards is a pretty good service though, as it seems that it’s only real concern is forums denying COVID-19 which isn’t a problem for us lol.
      2. We think ProBoards has the best design out of all the others we’ve come across, and has also been the easiest for us to set up. And its layout is very customizable which is good.
      3. Making and planning groups is definitely on the table for the future, but right now we’re just focused on bringing it together and making it presentable to people.

      Hope this helps!