communities disappearing from self-hosted forums and even Livejournal to places like Tumblr and Twitter, and to a lesser extent Reddit, was a move from spaces we controlled to spaces designed to control us
phpBB is terrible but it does what it wants to do. same with Discourse, though some design decisions are... odd. mastodon, on the other hand, does _not_ do what it tries to do - build communities around microblogging
what we need is to build federated forum software with two-way syndication - accessible from the Fediverse, from Twitter, from Tumblr, even from IM platforms.
for example - these posts syndicate to Twitter, but comments don't syndicate back, which means I have to maintain a real presence there.
@tindall If you like, you could use Brid.gy to get comments and reactions back from Twitter with Webmention support for your site. I've outlined some of it for how I'm doing it on WordPress, but the idea is very adaptable for any website out there, and there's a growing list of pre-existing code one could leverage.
(Hint: this also works for other common social platforms which Bridgy supports. As examples, I've got two-way communication [more...]
@tindall The problem is merely the amount of protocols & APIs something like that would have to implement.
An enormous task!
There are platforms, which implement both diaspora and ActivityPub (socialhome.network) and ones that implement both ActivityPub & GNUSocial (Pleroma), but external APIs are usually avoided here due to inevitably compromising data ownership: a staple of the #fediverse.
most people left livejournal after the Russians took over.
of course, this happened for good reasons - accessibility first and foremost. it allowed many new communities to form, too. if we want to have control, we need to ensure access too.