Perhaps this little study will be helpful for others…
Goal: Find a suitable replacement technology for email groups Problem: Popularity of Email groups is declining more than 5% per year Email servers are more expensive to run than web servers Email is increasingly untrustable - we want to register/authenticate users without using email - we want push/pull notifications via mobile/desktop, rather than using email Email is not very secure/private (eg. Gmail is thought to be data-mined) Current tools like Mimerdesk, Qmail, EZ-mlm are very aged - support is limited/non-existent - compliance with spam prevention strategies is exhausted What people don't appreciate in commercial solutions: People do not like others data mining their conversations People do not appreciate advertising (Facebook has gone from x% ads, to xx% ads in the last few years) People do not want to be tracked People do not like their privacy violated Trends: Mobile apps for keeping in touch of the latest news - Instant notifications - bonus feature: Offline replies, queued until reconnecting Web-based access for desktop users (big screens) Video conferencing Federation - Friendica, Mastodon, etc (the Fediverse). Why interconnect? - when your node goes down, all your users and content are gone, and from your perspective, the federation offered nothing. - the federation offers discoverability (both ways), like free advertising for your node - the federation may offer communication routing without using commercial relays (email, usenet, DNS) - the federation exposes your walled garden to "bad neighbors", in addition to good Cloud services - how is privacy assured? Content: Styled text Emoji Pictures Videos Live messaging/broadcasts Predecessor protocols: SMTP IRC NNTP HTTP FidoNet (BBS era) Social systems of interest: Facebook. - every use is exploited YouTube. Popular Open Source Forums software supporting tapatalk mobile app - only Forum capability phpBB - no wysiwyg, MBOX interface (1-2), not mobile friendly - did not accept styled text (will not at all) - BB means BBcode, and it's a real clumsy old-fashioned implementation *MyBB - wysiwyg, no email/nntp interface, but can Merge another forum that DOES support mbox, Simplicity theme is mobile friendly + pasting styled text works great + plugin for HTML posting capability (benefit unknown): https://community.mybb.com/mods.php?action=view&pid=16 + can upload image/movie to include in post (inline button during upload) + easily include youtube and pic URLs - 86 character subject limit (+ auto-truncate) O simple mobile app: https://github.com/0kzh/mybb-mobile (old/ugly, based on web browser) + symposium plugin stops email use for private messages + reputation system can block abusers from posting (req's plugin) Simple Machines Forum - wysiwyg, no email/nntp interface, not mobile friendly - did not accept styled text in default setting (forced to plain) - did not handle video link - hit limits for pic and message sizes FUDforum - wysiwyg, mbox, not mobile friendly, apparently no responsive theme, has been dying for years - did not accept styled text in default setting (forced to plain) - did not handle video link - clumsy experience - took uploaded pic, but really didn't Discourse - (not wysiwyg, side-x-side), mbox, moderately mobile friendly. Minima Dark seems ok-ish for mobile. - mangled styled text in unwanted ways (suppressed bold text) - does unexpected things with uploaded pictures and references to you tube videos - seems ugly to me bbPress - WordPress forum plugin - Subject limited to 80 characters - exposes WordPress to attack - did not accept styled text in default setting (forced to plain) - broken reply with pic and video links - did not resolve in main message - cannot upload pics, etc FluxBB - no wysiwyg, moderately mobile friendly, eg. Air, Earth, Fire and GrayOrange styles are responsive - Subjects truncated to 71 chars - pasting styled text results in unstyled text (no styled text editor - only BBcode) - mangled styled text in unwanted ways + has a nice GPL app for Archlinux Forums Android: https://gitlab.com/Kanedias/archforums-android - cannot upload pics, etc - development is dead - they are joining up with Flarum Flarum - no wysiwyg, moderately mobile friendly, startings of mbox interface (below) + mobile app for Android and iOS - Fluam (developed in China) https://discuss.flarum.org/d/24291-a-flarum-native-client-for-android-ios-by-flutter/176 (on play store: Fla) + had notifications and MUCH more - developer is completely starting over from scratch right now (after 3 month break) - Subject limited to 80 characters - did not accept styled text in default setting (forced to mangled, plain) - no way to get proper message display from styled email + wysiwyg plugin: https://discuss.flarum.org/d/25590-true-markdown-wysiwyg - adding an image/link is very cryptic + upload plugin: https://discuss.flarum.org/d/4154-friendsofflarum-upload-the-intelligent-file-attachment-extension + formatting plugin: https://discuss.flarum.org/d/17770-friendsofflarum-formatting + youtube link handled well + crude email interface: https://discuss.flarum.org/d/22855-wip-extension-mailbox - You get two display modes: 1. takes up the whole screen to present "boxes" of unsorted forum names. 2. basically twitter - another disorganized stream of talk - large dependency set Friendica [Fediverse] - simply too complex (and buggy) for the average user Mastodon [Fediverse] - just another twitter - like twitter, no Subjects - 500 character limit to posts (can be changed via https://discourse.joinmastodon.org/t/howto-raise-the-character-limit/763) - pasting styled text results in unstyled text + easily upload your local pics/videos - URLs to pics/videos do not resolve in the message + nice mobile app (Tusky) - very complex, large dependency set (worse than Flarum) - not sure if/how Google indexes the content BuddyBoss [commercial fork of bbPress] - WordPress forum plugin - appears more like Facebook than just a forum app - Subject limited to 80 characters - $$$$/yr - ongoing fees, due to wordpress upgrades and required updates - exposes WordPress to attack + pasting styled text works great + pasted YouTube links resolve to clickable images automatically + allows local image upload easily in message + very nice mobile app O referenced here as it sets a high bar for capability, for those who can afford it