Millennials invent a forum. Part Three

Part two: How to build a community

We know why to build a community now. We know why we should not use social networking to build it. And we know that chat-based communities will slow down or die due to the real-time nature of chat-related apps.

Before social networks and chats, forums were the most convenient way to build community around any area of human life. There are still a lot of big old-fashioned forum sites with a huge audience. It is unnecessary to say that Reddit is a perfect example of a modern forum with an incredible audience and perfect tools to manage an enormous number of people in each subreddit.

The easiest and cheapest way to build an open, partly independent community is to just start a new Reddit sub. Moreover, Reddit might bring an audience to you. By contrast with other social networks, Reddit is open to anyone without registration. Compared with Twitter, it has tools for any amount of text and moderation tools. The biggest disadvantage is that it is still not yours. They are for free speech, but there is still a chance that they will remove your content and community due to an internal regulation or decision. And yet your payment is free content for Reddit, but it's worth that.

If we are talking about the notorious cloud-out-of-the-box solution to build forum-based communities on your domain or subdomain such as Tribe, Insided or Circle. Well, it is mostly about cost effectiveness. They all work out of the box with minimal setup requirements. But as subscribed-based Saas are quite overpriced, especially in the case of building forum-based communities, a significant amount of time is needed. Choose it by your budget and don't forget to backup if possible. Don't pay attention to the features list. The most important part of the community is its active members. Number of active members based on their passion for your community core and willingness to share that passion with others. Community features are just a wrapper; everything you need is an asynchronous tool to share messages.

If you are ready to run a fully independent community on your own infrastructure, the best way is to setup open source solutions like flarum.org or forem.com. Both are incredibly rich with features and easy to manage any number of members. The difference is in UI and UX and the tech stack to run it. The core feature of forum-based communication is just perfect in both.

And of course, I'm all for open source and full independence. It gives maximum flexibility but requires some technical knowledge, which is challenging but interesting as well.

For sure, setting up or choosing an engine and building the first community structure is not enough. You will need to put some power into it. There are a few ways to do that, but I'll share them a little later. Stay tuned!