Flarum has great potential: it ranks first on Google, has 40.000 downloads. And yet, only a handful of active forums exist. Most showcases on this forum are dead. And there are only 4 people who have made more than 3 commits this year.
There is no long term goal defined. For the sake of argument, I will assume it is:
Flarum will be relevant by the year 2020.
To become relevant, Flarum needs active users.
To get active users, Flarum needs higher code quality and drop the beta label.
To get higher code quality, Flarum needs more contributors.
Flarum needs more contributors
As outlined here, finding new contributors should be a top priority for Flarum. Now, what motivates people to contribute to open source?
- Public gratitude
- Improve coding skills
- Reward of creative process
- Monetary reward (GSoc or peripheral business)
- Scratching ones own itch
The crux is, all of these can be fullfilled at any of the gazillion other opensource projects. The only thing that could be unique to Flarum is number 5: somebody running a forum has a problem that s/he will fix her/himself and submit upstream.
Conclusion: the number of Flarum contributors is a direct function of the number of active installations.
What is holding back active installations?
This is hard to objectively measure, but a likely candidate is the big fat warning "DO NOT USE IN PRODUCTION" that is shown in every Flarum copy. I understand Toby's desire to not disappoint users. But there's a big difference between scaring people away and stating the facts ("your extensions may not work with a future release"). Telling people that there are bugs does not convey new information: all software has bugs and most people are used to it.
A second likely impediment is the number of visibile bugs that a prospective user encounters within the first hours of trying the new software. Those Flarum bugs aren't hard to measure, the forum and discord give a very clear picture:
- The JS error upon disabling/enabling extensions
- Internal server error
- Icons are squares
Problem 1 and 3 affect everybody. Problem 2 only affects people who are unexperienced with setting up server software and/or are using lower end hosting plans.
Flarum should focus on power users
Time for a rhetorical question. What would be better for Flarum: 1 new user that is able to code and might submit a PR in the future, or 50 new users that cannot code? Therefore, it seems clear that Flarum in the short term should forget about building web-based installers and spoon-feeding documentation, but instead focus on the bugs / features that are relevant to power users. As they will be the early adopters who will eventually build the web-installers and so forth. Specifically, that would require fixing problems number 1 and 3.
Learning from other organisations
How do other orgs handle software lifecycle and disappointed users? Some cases
PUBG
A highly sucessfull online game that was released as "beta". Some would say that this proves that beta-labelled software can be successful. However, games are a casual activity that require no upfront investment. Forums, while easy to install, require a huge amount of effort to kickstart (both building a new community or converting an existing one). People are understandably reluctant to invest so much time in a product that says "do not use me".
GMail
GMail was branded "beta" for years, while amassing millions of useres. Now, this is also completely different from Flarum. GMail had from its start a company behind it that is one of the most respected brands on earth. Flarum doesn't have such reputation. Yet ?
Magento
Magento is the most popular opensource e-commerce software. Two years ago, Magento released version 2.0 which was completely incompatible with v1 and the whole of the existing ecosystem. But was v1 branded as beta? No, of course not. V1 was required to get traction and get the ecosystem started. v2 brought higher quality (and better revenue for the parent organisation). Lesson: People can be disgruntled sometimes but eventually they understand that software evolves, as does everything else in the world.
Finally
Thanks for reading so far. Merry Christmas all! Looking forward to 2020, which will hopefully be a Flarum success year! ?
