In light of recent developments, let's hammer out a specification for a satellite/lifeboat CE community.
While there is a decent number of CE discord servers, they tend to be siloed and their cumulative network effects are hampered by the fracturing of communities and discussions within these respective silos. The subreddits also have this same issue.
What I would like to build is a forum with the following characteristics:
- Has functional and aesthetic parity with the GameFAQs message boards.
- Ideally functions in a peer-to-peer manner such that the state of the forum and its messages live not on a server (which could prove to be a central point of failure in a number of ways), but rather on the local machines/clients of users, with updates synced through a gossip protocol which users could be encouraged to passively contribute to through an opt-in background daemon.
- From a user experience standpoint it should be an open community, such that anyone can join and post without getting banned over historical interpersonal squabbles, but:
- With moderation mechanisms to discourage spam, abusive behavior, illicit conduct, and other things broadly undesired by CE as a community and by GameFAQs moderation standards, including but not limited to the ability of users to block and ignore other users and render their posts inaccessible to such, similar to how CE functions now, and perhaps to have custom filters they can share and/or opt into.
From a technological standpoint, details to be considered are:
- The ideal application stack for a system/platform like this.
- How to accomplish this in a cross-platform manner with negligible platform-specific development overhead - no apps, but rather browser-based with caching is the ideal. Ideal targets would be Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts.