The biggest problem we had with implementing traditional forums in the fediverse is the fact that a title is optional in most microblog projects - and is a critical index in a forum application. We tried various approaches to create forums where the title was optional (and auto-generated from whatever content is provided) but these typically look awful and nobody really cares for them. For example somebody posting just a video or image. You can use the link as the title, but this rarely conveys any useful information. Eventually we settled on conversational groups which don’t have this need for a topic summary/headline; it’s just the first post in the group thread. You can create a forum app under your control where a title is mandatory, but then people can’t always post from their own fediverse accounts on their own server unless their service recognises the title is mandatory and helps to enforce it. Some projects don’t even have the concept of a title.
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