If you’ve been around the admin community - on forums like Administrata, Another Admin Forum, Forum Promotion, and others - you’ve probably noticed something: it’s often the same familiar faces. We’re a group of dedicated community builders, each striving to grow and maintain our own spaces. Doesn't matter if it’s a general chat forum, gaming, entertainment, or even another admin-focused forum, the niche doesn’t matter - we’re all working toward the same goal: creating a welcoming and active community.
I've often had an amusing thought. Let's look at the bigger picture. Right now, many forums feel like tiny villages in a big, quiet world. A world that, let’s be honest, isn’t as bustling as it once was.
Now imagine this....... what if all those villages joined forces? What if we worked together to build a thriving city? Combining our efforts with other admins in the same niche to create something far more dynamic and engaging than we could alone. Think about the energy, the activity, and the opportunities that would come from a united community.
It’s food for thought: could collaboration be the key to making forums busy and thriving again?
No but seriously. Imagine only having one forum to be part of where everyone is present, instead of 5-10 different small forums where you always see the same people.
But seriously. What you’re talking about is an idea that’s been floated a few times and makes a heckuva lot of sense for certain niches where the fragmentation hurts rather than helps.
And then we can start talking about sensibly getting our own take on federation sorted out and making the discovery gap smaller (which is a variation in the mix, that is closer but not as close as a union)
It would surely drive more engagement. If there's less place to flood to as an audience, then the audience is closer together which results automatically in a bigger engagement since the audience grows.
It's simple, imagine if Administrata, Forum Promotion and Shawn's AAF merged. Instead of having three audiences where half is jumping from the one to the other, we'd be seeing way more engagement. In reality this isn't as simple as it sounds though. But yeah. It's an amusing thought.
No but seriously. Imagine only having one forum to be part of where everyone is present, instead of 5-10 different small forums where you always see the same people.
It is almost always in the interests of similar forums to "merge" and become one community - increased activity on the one site is better than fragmented activity across two sites. When forums are in the same niche, you'll generally tend to find that most active members are on both sites anyway, but there'll likely be a few on both sites that haven't discovered the other, so concentrating them in one place makes sense.
It also makes sense because the more active a single forum is, the much more likely a guest randomly chancing upon the forum through an internet search or advert posted elsewhere will sign up and begin to engage and start the process of becoming a part of the core community.
The issue is simply trust. As admins, we all like to retain some sense of control over our forums. In order for "mergers" and team ups like this to work, all the admins/parties involved in the project need to be secure in the knowledge that their "ownership" or stake in the site is secure. With most web hosting setups, and the fact that admins are frequently not just in different cities or countries but frequently different Continents, makes the whole trust issue difficult for most. There are solutions - legal contracts can be drawn up to protect each party, or cryptographic keys can be used to manage "ownership" over critical functions for each person, but these solutions can sometimes present their own problems, including managing failsafes and inevitably, the cost involved with such solutions.
The idea is a great one and if the details could be worked out I'm sure it'd be a very successful project, I'm just skeptical on how eager people would be to get on board without some form of security involved.
I don't think everyone would be on board with this idea. You'd have people wanting their own community with their own rules and might not like the approach taken by the staff on this one mega forum. I get the concept is good on paper, but I just don't see it working out.
Consider also Mastodon vs BlueSky - this is in effect the same issue, decentralised everything vs centralised everything. Plenty of people will happily cede control if they don't have to manage it and just want somewhere to talk.
I think we have to begin by fostering the idea that people should want their own little shared spaces and that making these should be easy to do, in a way they currently are not.
