Hello! Happy to give some more info.
I've been running communities for nearly 25 years. I've seen just about everything during this time, and today, I believe we should do everything we possibly can to empower communities and help people discover them.
We've seen a decline in traditional forum activity since around 2014, with a small recovery around 2020. Since then, things have been going downhill slightly again. The positive thing is that I've also noticed a slight increase in new communities popping up over the last few months. So there's still hope!
That said, Foroverse is not a replacement for forums. Quite the opposite, actually. We want to help forums grow and become more discoverable.
The internet still has many hidden gems that hardly anyone has heard about. Some of these communities have been around for decades, filled with valuable discussions, knowledge and people who genuinely care about their interests. Unfortunately, finding them isn't always easy anymore.
That's where Foroverse comes in.
Think of it as a discovery platform with a social media-like feed, but built entirely around traditional forums. You can browse discussions from different communities in one place, discover interesting topics, follow your favourite forums and find new communities you probably wouldn't have come across otherwise.
It's a little more than an RSS reader, though. We have integrations for XenForo, Invision Community, WoltLab and ForumSpark, allowing communities to connect directly to Foroverse. With more coming soon. Members can also link their existing forum accounts, making it possible to interact with supported communities without constantly switching between websites.
One thing I want to make very clear is that forum owners remain in control. We're not acquiring communities, taking ownership of their content or trying to replace their websites. Administrators decide what they want to share on Foroverse, and what they don't. They can exclude certain forums or content, and private discussions remain private. Everything is optional, nothing is mandatory.
For members, the benefit is discovering discussions and communities around their interests. For administrators, it's an additional channel to reach people who might otherwise never have found their forum.
We're obviously still very new. At the moment, 15 forums have joined us, with over 40,000 discussions already discoverable through Foroverse. That's a pretty decent start, but there's still a long way to go.
Over time, I'd love to see hundreds, eventually thousands, of independent communities connected. Imagine being interested in a particular subject and being able to discover discussions from dozens of forums dedicated to it, including communities you never knew existed.
As for the commercial side of things, Foroverse is an independent project. We're not building a VerticalScope-style network where we acquire and operate forums. The communities remain entirely independent, and that's how we want to keep it. Naturally, keeping a platform running costs money, and we'll need to cover those costs, but the goal is to build something that benefits the forum ecosystem rather than taking advantage of it.
I don't believe traditional forums are dying. I believe they're becoming harder to find, especially with social media dominating so much of the internet. If we can make discovering and participating in communities easier, perhaps we can help change that.
And who knows, maybe we'll bring a little bit of that old internet feeling back along the way. 🙂
Hope that clears things up a little!
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