Why a forum? Why Discourse? Why not Discord?

General
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Christoph_C._Cemper_A_surreal_digital_landscape_with_a_person_n_50263ca0-68f4-48fd-be2f-5f5838608223
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It all started with a wake-up call on February 25 when a couple of trustworthy moderators were banned by Facebook, automated and wrongfully. One of them was Ammon Johns, who I’ve known for years and the most reasonable person I know writing stuff online.

Facebook is plagued by spam, abuse, and scams. Facebook is a high-frequency dopamine-delivering platform. Facebook must have harsh measures for fighting any wrongdoing.

It’s evident that such algorithms go wrong, and I’ve been banned a couple of times in the past. The problem is that it can take days or weeks - if at all - to get your account reinstated.

This requirement and policy are not compatible with how we envision our user support and prompt engineering community.

I was sorry for this hassle for @Ammon .

But I was also thankful for the reminder of how unreliable Facebook can be as a business partner, namely the User Community for AIPRM in our case. I could have been following, after all. Then what? Lose access to my community? Lose many hours invested into this community not.

It was a hack - there was no time and no certainty if AIPRM would become “big enough,” i.e. worth setting up something serious.

So we are moving off of Facebook effective today March 3.

The volume of content became chaotic anyways, already.

Why not Discord?

Discord is also a “cloud service” with another company keeping our data.

No thanks; we are 100% self-hosted. We set the server up at Linux level, Firewall level.

But Discord is “popular” in the AI Community!

Yes, and the gamers, and crypto, and NFTs. Everything where note, even the dopamine trigger from Facebook, is not enough.

We’re not looking to cultivate or brag about 100s of likes within minutes.

The AIPRM community is not about high-traffic / low engagement, not about dopamine kicks.

We are looking to cultivate a community of a few but high-engaged users.

If you’re looking for more dopamine kicks, the AIPRM Community is the wrong place.

Discord is also not web indexed, and I never took just 1 piece of content from a Discord channel and found it useful, over web-indexed sources.

Why not XYZ Platform?

Most of them are just hosted SaaS platforms.

Older message boards like PHPBB are outdated.

Why not LinkedIn groups?

AAgain, it would not be self-hosted.

And frankly - why is everyone on a platform where you cannot even copy/paste/drag an image into a post? Ridiculous.

AIPRM Forum on the web

The AIPRM community is now located at forum.aiprm.com and is operated by AIPRM; no social media platform to have a say in our user support. It’s web-indexed already and the posts will help many existing and future AIPRM users without having to join a “social media platform.”

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That is a wonderful decision, being independent and self-sufficient will eliminate most of the unnecessary control issues and stress. Plus this forum will offer all the customizable infrastructure for an exponentially growing business. Well done! :slightly_smiling_face:

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I like the ‘100% self-hosted’ concept, besides the reasons you mentioned that’s already make sense for such a business.
Self-hosting is the approach for series businesses, you are not trying to have fun here, so Discord would’ve never been a primary choice.

Much support,
Keep up the good work.

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No problem emigrating from Facebook. FB can be great as a start-up platform but after a while you want to have full controll yourself. FB is not the future of communities. I’m looking forward participating, reading and following this community. I belive it has a huge potential to create difference in the ai space. Greetings from Stockholm.

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Totally understand. this is how to protect our information with kind of platform that they tracked us and stealing our information not only what we are taking but also kind of idea. Thank you for creating such a good app for us.

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Seems I joined the community here on day one. One note your email I got pointed me to the facebook group. But will enjoy seeing the group grow.
Zaharli Xxarobalar-11-04-2022-BR

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Yes, even hour 1, not just day 1 :slight_smile: welcome!

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Love it. Excited for it. Let’s go!

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Joined here right away. I never joined the group for same reasons. I don’t like FB in general.

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I just uninstalled Facebook from my phone, again.

Our dedicated discourse server works amazing fast, not just in browser but also phone.

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really understand why so many of us get banned ( me as working with alternative health drives me crazy!) makes life so hard or content not being seen gave up with fb a year ago and tried afew since then telegram, linkedin etc use discord but not for groups, still not found what does work for me . we be great to see how this works and thank you for all aiprm totally amazing and loving it

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Hello great decision to use a private server with linux and if i understood well having enabled some tools like ufw ipban etc.
wish you, us the very best in this adventure.
Tim

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Glad to be here, Day 1 of AIPRM community

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I’ve said elsewhere (many, many times over the years) but it bears much repetition - if a community is important in any way to a business, it should as much as possible own the forum in order to protect it.

For those who don’t know me, from Facebook or elsewhere, I’ve been a community member, moderator, and occasional admin since the old IRC days. An active member of web forums since the mid 90s when they were a lot uglier (back before we had CSS, layers, etc) and simpler. I’ve also built or run or consulted on literally hundreds of communities and forums (of various kinds) for businesses, back when self-hosted forums were ‘social media’ - all of it.

Facebooks atrocious errors in how they handle the automation of moderating are always mind-boggling to me. I’ve literally never worked for or with any company or entity that simply cared so little for users, or the user experience. And I’ve worked in such cuddly, caring industries as banking, insurance, and the adult industries.

For anyone with a business-affecting stake in Facebook, let me tell you how I got banned. One (unknown) user in one of the open (non-private) groups where I was a moderator, a group with over 20,000 members, posted something apparently offensive or indecent. We don’t know which or what, as Facebook caught and deleted it before any of the (quite large) moderating team actually saw it. Just minutes later, every moderator, admin, and member of the group had their accounts suspended.

Something horribly wrong in the automation banned all of the members of an open group with tens of thousands of members, despite the group having been running for many years, having an excellent reputation, etc. MOST of the damage has been fixed, accounts unfrozen, bans lifted, and the group restored in the days since, but a couple of moderators remain locked out of Facebook and all other Meta-owned accounts and services. Not for anything they posted, nor anything they did, but due to poorly coded automation, and a policy that effectively eliminates any human review.

That’s not just a warning about Facebook for any of you who depend on it. It is also a very important warning about automation itself, especially relevant to our community.

My father used to say “To err is human, but to really F*©x everything up you need automation/computers”.

It’s funny because it is so true. Humans build and run machines, so the potential for error is always built-in - but automation can scale that error across a thousand, or a million instances, before you even notice an issue.

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Of course, just like many other production servers we run, also for AIPRM services, backend, web app and website.

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Thanks for your intro and for moderating us here also.

I am glad we moved away ASAP now, before even more damage could have happened.

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I’m glad to be here since day one, congratulations for your self-hosted site, it would be awesome if AIPRM, teach us how to create a self-host site, multipurpose and reliable. Cloud services are sometimes overestimated and some of them are even dangerous.
I’ll do my best to share insights and ideas and of course enjoying the same from the members of this community.
Happy weekend to all

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The decision to leave FB was a good one. But Discord is a little different than what is presented here. I’m not a big fan, but I use it intensively and find it very convenient. But well, the decision is made.
Can we have a “introduce yourself” channel?

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I think this is a great decision; it’s also inspiring. This is the best way to grow your community. In my years of being in this digital space, I’ve seen many social pages shut down and blocked. One, in particular, got blocked two hours before the launch of their event, which was almost detrimental to their business. Self-hosting all the way :+1:

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Welcome Georg!

Please introduce yourself here.
https://forum.aiprm.com/t/welcome-to-aiprm-please-introduce-yourself-here/837/4

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