I feel like it would be appropriate to share some of these forums in this thread, I think the immediate need outweighs anyone calling it out as self-promotion.
Not all of them are applicable, the platform has also been used for forums that connect old-age pensioners homes (it's easy to use), and support networks for victims of domestic sexual and violent abuse in South London.
One of the newest is a sustainability forum for a group with a core around Cambridge but spread over the UK https://onething.is/
Some of the forums are private, and I'm fine with that as they can permission it the way they want and pull members from elsewhere as they see fit, i.e. the petrolheads in Cornwall.
But I help nurture and guide, and show them how to do it.
Without funding I've slowed everything down though. It's funded by donations from users across sites today, but expansion risks cost cliffs as I'm just below the threshold for a few services I would need to pay for (auth0 free tier) and don't have time to engineer my way out. With neither time or money spare, it's stagnated.
But if someone wants a startup idea... this does work. Not wildly profitable, but it works.
How did it make money? I'd barely scratched the surface, but conversation around interest contains a lot of intent to purchase, and there are classifieds and meetups. So it's affiliates, a challenge against eBay (people into an interest have emotional attachment to the items and would rather sell to others into the interest), and ticketing for events, etc. And because it's all a platform, one instance, the traditional highs costs associated with running a forum were avoided. Lower costs, and actual revenues :)
I love what I do for work now, but I still believe this was an idea that is good for society.
Any plans to open source / open core this software? I've always been interested in forum software (my first real web project was a Reddit clone in Flask and the complexities and edgecases abound - moderation tools, rate limiting, scaling write-load, finding the minimum front-end that doesn't make users puke).
The only thing that isn't is the very old puppet script that managed the deploy as it was rather bespoke for our setup.
To my own regret I focused far too much on making it an effective platform rather than an easy install, so that bit might feel gnarly but at least the errors are sane and guide you.
Our legal policies for forums on this platform (expensive to produce, but perfectly fitting a forum platform with minimal exposure for the platform owner/admin and minimal but some liability for a forum owner) https://github.com/microcosm-cc/legal
There is also a newer thing, I was (/am?) intending to replace the Django layer with a Go frontend and templating, and then moving the API into this, such that the forum could become a single binary install and thus gain a new lease of life: https://github.com/buro9/microcosm . Once in a while I chip away on that.
Just wanted to say that your microcosm code was a huge inspiration/invaluable reference when I was learning go and developing my own forum like thing. Thanks!
