Hi everybody,

You may have stumbled onto this page, either through a new URL or through a post federating out to the wider network, and wondered “What the hell, why is a niche news publication launching a forum in 2025?”

The short answer to this is simple: our publication has been at the forefront of experimenting with decentralized publishing and community-building. This latest experiment involves us dipping our toes into the water and testing out an integration with the Threadiverse - that is to say, group conversation platforms such as Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, and a growing amount of other capable platforms that can all federate and talk to each other.

How We’re Doing This

We’ve adopted NodeBB, mainly because of its native adoption of ActivityPub, but also because it seems like damned good forum software. We want to try to blur the lines between local, old-fashioned message board, and integrated communities across vast networks. Some of these experiments will involve using ActivityPub to pipe content from other places, such as our Podcast, our news publication, and a variety of other places.

We’re interested in building a fun and supportive space for people working on the next generation of decentralized communication apps, platforms, and frameworks, and we’re excited to see what comes of this.