Action Last Updated: 25 December 2024 - 12:04 PM

I learned about this forum when I first searched for cryonics information a decade or so ago. Since then, large social media platforms have come to dominate, and independent forums have been dying out. I see that you briefly discussed this phenomenon in this thread.

I believe this is an incredibly problematic phenomenon (Eg: reddit is dangerous, as is allowing single entities to control so much public information, discord and email groups are private and hard to find, facebook is a horrible company and enshittified platform). I've been recommending that other people ditch these large social media platforms and go back to independent forums like this one.

The problem in this case seems to be that the owners of this forum appear to be content with their forum dying out and are not taking steps to improve/update the forum and keep it working well and attractive to new users.

Examples:

* Email notifications have not been working for months, and there has been no response on why https://www.longecity.org/forum/topic/114464-email-notifications-stopped/

* The software being used is quite old and has lots of room for improvement. An admin agreed, but there's been no further word or development for the past year https://www.longecity.org/forum/topic/117271-changing-the-forum-software-over-to-xenforo/

These are two other major improvements that could be implemented:

* https://www.longecity.org/forum/topic/109448-merging-sub-forums-to-increase-traffic/

* https://www.longecity.org/forum/topic/117994-email-digest-notifications-for-subforum-subscriptions/

Two others that bother me are how much unnecessary whitespace there is, and I'm not a fan of how URLs are not fully shown.

It's already much more convenient for people to use one big social media platform vs multiple independent forums. So it's absolutely vital that your user experience/interface is not ALSO worse than those big platforms. You must make it as easy and appealing as possible for people to switch over. Deficits with your forum UX are hindering my efforts to get people to use it over the big social media platforms.

It is not difficult. I set up my own small forum for another topic while having no expertise and little money to spend on it. It costs me $5/mo. I shared how here. And here is the result in action. I think it's a good example of a compact, modern forum layout and appealing design.