Thanks for the info, although the plan for now is via a VPS due to the lower costs. As for exporting databases - I’m currently using flarum, so I’m guessing I wouldn’t be able to export data from flarum and transfer it over to nodeBB.

I appreciate all the advice though!

I understand why you’re getting downvoted, but at the same time - I completely understand the sentiment. In a perfect world, you’re right, we should be able to reuse what we have and our society is utterly obsessed with consumerism. But being realistic and practical - that’s not going to happen for many reasons, at least not in our lifetime.

But I think that creating something that will last, is repairable, and open source is a step in the right direction and is better than the current alternatives. I’m not saying we shouldn’t continue to advocate and push for the ideals of what you are saying - but we shouldn’t push away progress in the right direction as we fight for those ideals. It doesn’t have to be “one or the other” it can be a multipronged approach that advocates for the ideal scenario while accepting small incremental progress as well.

I’m not saying this specific product is or is not the solution (it might be a terrible product or the people behind the product might have terrible intentions, idk. . . But the idea of products build to last, be repairable, and open for improvement, etc etc is a good step forward in my mind. Ehh, my 2 cents.

I think it might largely depends on your 1. Career/job/ or even hobby requirements 2. Where you live (government agencies requiring paper documents, signatures, etc)

You make some great points all around, and I pretty much agree all around. Of course, it’s very possible that this falls through and fails to establish for those same reasons you mentioned - but I figured it doesn’t hurt to give it a solid effort and try. As mentioned in some other comments across different crossposts, I think I will most likely need to make the transition to the permenant platform earlier rather than later, as soon as I’m somewhat confident that this experiment is has a decent chance of gaining members. (I’m thinking I just need to get a small handful of committed members first, then work together to establish the new platform).

Anyways, I greatly appreciate your willingness to join even if it’s just to lurk a while :). Of course if you have feedback or ideas I’m always open to constructive criticism.

Oh, ok - I see what you are saying. To use that community to federate with. Yeah that’s a great idea - and I’ll definitely keep it in mind once I eventually switch over to nodeBB :)

Oooh this is a nice sub :) Do you think that a forum community counts as something I made to cross post there?

Yeah, I totally feel this - and it’s one of the major drawbacks that I mentioned in the article. To compromise my sanity (of possibly spending a lot of time, and some money) with not losing all the progress of th community - my plan is to transfer early.

It’s not the perfect solution - I admit, but I feel that if I can just get a small handful (maybe 10-15 people are semi active/committed to the goal of the community) then I’d feel comfortable transitioning because I know we have a decent foundation to grow off from. But mainly I’m using this free hosting platform just to make sure there are actual people who are interested, and it’s not dead idea on arrival.

I will be honest though, the more I’ve been trying to get this community started - the more I’m tempted to just bite the bullet and go strait to buying a VPS and domain to set up nodeBB. I think if I can just get the feeling that people are actually interested and it’s not going to be a waste of my resources, then I might just do that.

Super valid point though. (I might even be able to find a way to save the data from this forum and preload it into the other forum - but I kind of doubt it since they are two different pieces of software)

Yeah, that’s the plan :) just trying to see if I can get people initially interested and active in the community before I take the leap to actually paying for and setting up an entire nodeBB site. This free hosting option makes it easy to see if it’s even worth pursuing further. But yeah, I’m excited to hopefully get transferred over to nodeBB, seems like a solid forum software, especially for modern day internet needs with their group chat capability for more of a “discord” like experience for people who are actively collaborating.