I recently came across LemmyBB, a frontend for Lemmy that is based on the popular forum software phpBB. It seems like a great way to bring the familiar forum experience to the federated world of Lemmy. However, I haven’t seen any significant migration of forums to Lemmy using this UI. What could be the reasons behind this? Are there any technical or usability issues that are preventing forums from adopting LemmyBB and moving to the Lemmy platform?
I got the impression that the federated phpBB is even more alpha level than Lemmy/kbin are. It seems to be a very niche need to have a forum like that hooked up to a federated information source. But who knows, we could see an explosion of sites eventually that are a mix of old school forums but all connected, like web rings version 2.0.
I was thinking about this the other day and it’s good to see a project like this.
Although it’s early days, I could see people skipping establishing their own forums and, instead, setting up their own instance because it gives your forum a much greater reach.
The tricky bit would be in migrating existing forums over here. If you had your own instance it could be doable once the relevant scripts had been perfected - you’d just be moving information from one database to another. As I’ve overseen a few migrations of forum software, I know that’s easier said than done but not impossible.
It’s definitely an area I’ll be keeping an eye on.
What could be the reasons behind this?
Could be the “If you build it they will come” situation. I hadn’t heard about it personally. I am a big fan of old style forums.
Because there’s a dwindling numbers of forums out there and probably very few new forums made every day. The established forums probably don’t want to move everything to a new system and new forums might want something more established.
Yeah, most established forums with active user bases have been around for a loooooong time. One of the reasons people are still active on them is because they haven’t made significant changes.
There’s no drama like changes to forum drama.
Yeah, most established forums with active user bases have been around for a loooooong time. One of the reasons people are still active on them is because they haven’t made significant changes.
There’s no drama like changes to forum drama.
Could be a case of “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it”
I’ve got a website based on Joomla that is over 10 years old. I know Wordpress is a better option and have been using it for other stuff for the last 5 years.
Why isn’t the first one migrated over to Wordpress? Because I can’t be fucked, it still works.
I migrated away from PHPBB, im pretty sure anyone still on it is terrified of the consequences of being the first to try that.
