ernestdefoe
Absolutely mate, I totally agree with you here.
Although I may not be an experienced admin, I've been using forums/hybrid-forums for roughly a decade now. First starting out on Quora, contributing to several psych topics and where to my surprise I quickly gained a loyal following right up until suddenly being ejected in early 2018.
I tried FB, YT & the like after that....yet both FB & YT in particular...😂 always suspend my accounts within less than 24hrs and I haven't a clue why they keep doing that even now.
So back in '18 I moved on to Telegram, Bitchute & such briefly, only finding these as toxic as the mainstream FaceTubes. Inevitably I stumbled onto forums—(😄 which I somehow hadn't even been aware of before 2018)
Since then I've joined & participated on several hundreds of forums.... I've also kept a list of them all too-(over 8 notepad pages worth)
Frankly I might've actually developed an addiction to forums right off the bat.
But anyways, the most prominent feature I've noticed about forums during these recent years, is the prevalence of glaringly toxic controlling conduct....of which more often seems to be considered acceptable behaviour, encouraged and even regarded as "a good thing"....eg: shortly before leaving XF I publicly called out a well known bully who was busily trying to manipulate a new community member...yet rather than being backed up by anyone, or otherwise just being told to shut my mouth. Nope, instead the head mod and a couple of certain higher status individuals took it upon themselves to fabricate a fictional scenario intended to smear me as some sort of "evil doer"...(🤣in this case it backfired on them immediately)
Alas XF ain't the exception in this toxic respect. The same dysfunctional communal behaviour is seemingly "normalized" among most forum communities...at least those I've frequented.
Toxic conduct is "good", while non-toxic conduct is treated as if near on outright criminality. It's just bloody absurd.
I'd given up on forums earlier this year, thinking they're all generally the same and all lorded over by toxic developers.
Yet fortunately while looking for something else about a month ago, Google search results produced a Flarum post by a significant former XF third party dev who I've interacted with previously.
He had commented on his positive impressions of Flarum and stated intending to jump on board with development.
Whether he has or not I'm still not sure, however seeing that he was keen to give Flarum a go was enough to motivate my checking it out too.
A month or so later and here I am.
I think Flarum overall is well ahead of all the competition. Perhaps not in terms of commercial dominance or profitability. Yet in several critical fundamental respects, which I suspect most people probably don't afford much attention generally, Flarum definitely has a strong lead.
🙂And I still haven't seen any signs of toxicity here.
As far as I'm aware, I think good sir luceos is the Flarum boss mang. So naturally I've been paying a lot of attention to his general behaviour around this forum.
😎 I've been looking for any indications of dishonourable conduct.
So far all I've found luceos doing is conducting himself entirely honourably all the time.
Even last week when I engaged a little harmless trick provocation test to see if I'd be "punished"....😄instead I think luceos thought it was mildly humourous.
Which, to me, suggests great character.
🤔... alrighty, I'm likely rambling for the sake of rambling now, and shall abruptly conclude by stating that I genuinely am growing very fond of everything about Flarum.
