Damn man I work at home—NO NAPS!

How many folks have been coming out?

So is this what we need?

- Fast, mobile friendly, modern forum software
- Open source with affordable, customizable SaaS hosting
- Easy deployment, and easy to contribute to
- Highly customizable but great defaults
- Off-ramps from SaaS if you want to host your own instance

I would love this!

Hosting can be solved though--Discourse and other forums have operated on a SaaS model with off-ramps to your own hosting for a long time now. The cost of starting up is still too large ($100/mo for a site with a custom domain) and there's still the problem of the software just being crappy.

Hosting seems to be a major hurdle--community managers probably aren't interested in provisioning databases, keeping software up-to-date, etc. But perhaps that's just the price to pay for freedom from the hegemony of enshittified, politically-influenced, data-harvesting major platforms.

I have to imagine the accelerating enshittification of sites like Reddit and Discord is leaving people looking for an alternative solution when they want to start a community.

Would anyone actually want to use this? Centralized apps are certainly still dominant but I feel like the sun could be setting on these major social media properties. We could be heading into an era where people again want to build their own communities.

My approach would involve creating an easily deploy-able, easily theme-able forum package that mostly operates with sever-rendered HTML. It would be fast by default.

It would feature modern design language, mentions and tags, predictable information architecture, and a mobile friendly design.