Flarum ↔ Discord / Telegram Mirroring

GoodTimes

We must acknowledge that chat applications like Discord and Telegram are more popular and convenient to use these days than forums (here you can argue with your personal experience, but I'm talking about the general trend).

There are many reasons for that, while the most important ones are notifications, app icon badges, and instant, truly reactive interfaces, which, in sum, significantly increase engagement and retention.

That's why many of us maintain our communities not only on forums but also on these chat apps. Even Flarum has a Discord server.

In addition to the above-mentioned features that make chat engagement and retention much higher than forums, there is another important issue that we need to address when running our communities on these platforms.

Problems

Information segmentation (some valuable content may be posted in one community but missed in the other)
Lack of control over data (you don't own it, and if something happens with a third-party service, it might be lost entirely)
Duplication of the same topics because users join all channels, leaving the same question and waiting for the fastest response, abandoning topics in other communities
Inability to search across all your communities simultaneously, as they are separate and only Flarum is indexable, while others are not
Inability to gain search engine traffic even if your community has superb content, for the same reason as in #4
And so on

Solution

This is where discussion mirroring from Discord/Telegram to Flarum, and vice versa, could significantly help and resolve most of these problems, including critical ones:

You own your data; even if a third-party service fails, all mirrored messages remain in Flarum
You can take advantage of Flarum's SEO capabilities

Mirroring

So, how should it work?

I envision an extension that allows us to connect our Discord servers / Telegram chats to Flarum and configure automated synchronization of messages in both directions, i.e., sending messages from Flarum to chats and storing messages from chats in Flarum.

I propose that we consider this idea and potential solutions, with the goal of finding the best implementation scenario.

jslirola

GoodTimes There is an extension that allows you to do a part of what you propose. You can configure a webhook to post content based on events that you fire on it.

https://discuss.flarum.org/d/17812-friendsofflarum-webhooks

Events

It is ready to use with Discord, Slack and Microsoft Teams, but there is a way to make it work under Telegram. In fact in my forum I have it working with my custom channel, take a look to this link:

FriendsOfFlarum/webhooks32

Oshvam

jslirola My English is not the best, but thank you for sharing this. I can think of many ideas to adapt it. For example, using Make/Integromat Webhooks to generate automated content from RSS feeds

fakruzaruret

jslirola good idea and sustainable major extension. May be Twitter also be added to compatible apps.

BartVB

For me (but that's just talking about my own experience) the main advantage of using Discord lies in the quick/accessible notifications of activity.

Would you still need synchronisation to Discord/Telegram if Flarum communities were easily able to show push notifications/app badges on mobile phones?

GoodTimes

BartVB Would you still need synchronisation to Discord/Telegram if Flarum communities were easily able to show push notifications/app badges on mobile phones?

Yes, 100%. Push Notifications and Badges are essential, but they solve only a small part of a huge problem. You still don't have full control over the content of your community when it's hosted by a 3rd party app like Telegram or Discord. Additionally, you don't benefit from SEO possibilities with your content.