Storyden: A forum for the modern age.
(www.storyden.org)
from EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 14 Feb 22:07
https://lemmy.world/post/43154006
from EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 14 Feb 22:07
https://lemmy.world/post/43154006
While looking for Discord alternatives I came across this project which looks like a great alternative for the kinds of Discord servers centered around Open Source projects and organizations. Ones where live chat and voice rooms aren’t the focus.
It’s a combination of forums and knowledge base that would be perfect for this use case.
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Love this… Will take a spin for my OpenAstra
Mind, seems to be vibecoded.
So?
It’s 2026, being vibecoded is a self-explanatory problem.
Well, I have seen so many classic coders write shitty unmaintainable and insecure code that I don’t think that NOT being vibe coded mean anything.
It’s like the difference bewteen publicly-traded and privately-owned companies. Publicly-traded companies are guaranteed to enshittify due to fiduciary duty. Privately-owned companies could enshittify, but it’s not guaranteed.
A human programmer could be shit but at least they’re not guaranteed to be shit like the vibe coding AI
I like the analogy…
But at the end of the day better to have something that starts shitty but can be improved over time rather than nothing.
If it stays shitty, then it’s just shit and won’t go anywhere.
And how is it supposed to get less shit if it’s vibe coded? The programmer didn’t learn anything when making the initial build
Maybe other devs join and improve the code, or maybe the original del learns and improve, or maybe he was already good bit had zero time and after a while goes back to improve the vibe coded project…
I prefer to judge by the results rather than by the means used.
The era of not judging the means ended in, like, 1066 or smth. Vibe-coded stuff for example means burning down a couple of forests just so the AI can propose where to place a semicolon, long before a “result” is even visible.
Its a common practice in bars and coffee shops in italy to keep a faucet running all day to always have cold water at hand. You should stop drinking coffe than to save clean water…
To be fair, I should have stopped drinking coffee 10 years ago for my blood pressure.
Why would experienced devs join a vibe-coded project that barely works to overhaul it? Most of the time it’d be quicker and easier to start a new project from scratch with the same goals but coded competently.
You’re bending over backwards just to come up with a plausible-sounding excuse for vibe-coding. But unfortunately, “plausible-sounding” isn’t the same as “plausible”.
Vibe coding might be “good enough” for a tiny private project for someone who doesn’t know how to code and isn’t interested in learning. But LLM’s aren’t good enough to build usable architectures.
And all publicly available human-created code was already trawled years ago, and the creation of more is slow. LLM’s can’t get significantly better at coding by just throwing more data into their training because there is no more data left that isn’t already in the training.
Hey 👋 creator of storyden here! it’s a labour of love that started long before “vibecode” was a word, almost 4 years ago now! I do use some language-model tooling now, but not anywhere close to blind-push-to-prod “vibe coding” :)
Some kind of weird WebGL error on their site I’ve never seen before.
Doesn’t load for me.
LibreWolf doesn’t seem to be offering to activate canvas.
Oh well.
Same for me, why does a forum software need webgl?
You mean why does the site for a forum software need webgl, by which the only reason I can think of is tracking visitors somehow. It’s not like the background landscape on the site is dynamic or something.
But, background is dynamic. You can see it has some kind of fancy moving dots. It’s totally unnecessary, but clearly WebGL was used for that.
Oh, so it is, hadn’t noticed it at first.
And, sure enough, disabling webgl in about:config causes the page to throw the error, instead of degrading gracefully. An animation of random dots is not at all necessary to expose about a product that is a web forum.
There is also a 3D spinning globe, so that too.
Once again, something that is absolutely not needed to explain what a forum software is and thus, should degrade gracefully. To a static png or something.
i added a dumb globe thingy and some useless effects in a mania of creative chaos, not felt a spark of creativity in ages and hate the current site, but you’re right this was stupid, i removed the useless webgl stuff and made it simpler, thanks for the feedback!
Thanks!
It’s not so much about wholly removing webgl contrasted to at least having some sort of fallback that allows the site to be experienced, but thanks again for at least tackling the change.
yeah I’m usually disciplined with progressive enhancement but not this time, should have been a .webm or .gif lol
Application error: a client-side exception has occurred while loading www.storyden.org (see the browser console for more information).Exactly same error for me. I’m glad there are such indicators so I don’t have to waste my time on such a crappy overcomplicated design.
Could be something everyone is blocking in their browsers. I know I use arkenfox. No joy with LibreWolf or Waterfox. I did pull it up in Opera, and it worked ok. I didn’t browse any further than the front page. I only use Opera for paying bills as Firefox, LibreWolf, and Waterfox are set up to block a lot of excess crap, and my utilities love their bullshit webpage candy.
Same for me in IronFox.
Also on cromite. Both disable webgl by default, iirc.
Not like a forum has a reasonable use case that requires webgl, tho.
Will have to look into this. Been saying for a while that a wiki-forum combo would make sense, since a forum slowly becomes a repository of knowledge, if not generally then at least for its members, and a less linear and more browsable way to catalog that knowledge would make sense. You can set up a separate wiki server but then you have two things to manage and moderate.
The marketing mixes metaphors, talking about gardening, growing, curating… all part of sustainable process that includes plants dying.
It also uses words like forever and permanent.
Having content live forever is at odds with metaphors of the natural world, where things naturally die.
I think the metaphors refer to different aspects of the project. The gardening refers to a more deliberate, small scale, cultivated experience tailored to your community, which is opposed to commercial factory farms that produce a monoculture on a massive scale for profit.
The permanence refers to the fact that you own and control the data, so you are in control of its lifecycle, not a third party that could kill it at their discretion.
Well permaculture is a thing in gardening ^^
I mean, it’s not “forever” as in “until the end of all things”, but as much set and forget as I would like in a knowledgebase (and in a garden).
hmmmm seems to deploy fine but when I try to register a new account (per the setup instructions) I just get an unknown error.
The concept is promising, as I said before I’ve been wishing for an integrated forum/wiki for a while now, but it seems like it’s very early days for this project.
The AI stuff has me bristling though. Not a fan.
hey, would love to know what that error was if you have any logs or can remember, and any feedback is truly welcome!
Whatever happened to vBulletin? That was peak forum software. Simple to use, no frills, and no bloated tracking shit.
All the car community forums are operated by Fora at this point, and they’re trying to push some bullshit AI assistant called “ForaFrank”. I blocked it on every car forum I’m a part of, and have encouraged others to do the same.
Never heard of vBulletin. I’m on a couple old phpBB conlanging forums that are still hanging around. My main gripe is the use of antiquated BB Code for formatting and a lack of a user mention feature.
As for modern forums, I like nodeBB.
thank you for sharing my product here! I grew up on forums, it’s somewhat of a love letter to the mid 2000s I spent many hours of my youth with, happy to answer any questions on the project!
Could you give us a brief overview of the use of AI in the production of Storyden? Like which components are ai-assisted, and to what degree?
I think this is the main sticking point people have with the project, especially since it is apparently in use but it’s not super clear how.
sure, so I use a ton of codegen and hand-write the openapi schema, jsonschemas and database model, I use AI often to write the mapping/binding boilerplate that goes between the outside-to-inside world (database stuff to queriers/writers and http handlers to actual logic) then I write the logic itself as well as the end-to-end tests. I find language models work very well once you have a clear set of constraints/boundaries such as a clear api contract + generated types or a set of tests that define the behaviour. I use a mix of claude and codex. Claude I find works well for exploratory/experimental work (a ton of the new plugin system was R&D so claude helped set up and tear down a bunch of potential implementations and ideas) codex is a lot less interactive and doesn’t seem to play well with creative r&d style exploratory workflows, so I use that one more for well planned out features using the codegen mentioned before.
while I somewhat understand the “sticking point” it allows me to work faster and focus on the more enjoyable side of the craft i’ve honed for almost 20 years. While it’s still not a super popular project and a couple of friends sometimes help, it’s just me doing it so the AI helps a lot when I only have a couple of hours a night to work on it!
outside of pure code, I used a combination of very early generative imagery models (circa 2022 I think) for the hero art, which started life as a sketch, scanned in, with some iterations on Dall-E (back when it was an app before chatgpt absorbed it) and a few hours painting and expanding in photoshop with my wacom. for future art on blog posts and such, I’m keen to commission a human artist for future marketing assets (in case you know anyone!)
and I think finally, lots of exploratory discussion with chatgpt on api design, http semantics, cross-browser cookie behaviours, boring stuff like that… very useful!
do you think it would be worth including some blurb about how ai tools are used in the readme for this kinda crowd who are understandably skeptical of many open source projects now due to irresponsible usage of ai?
I think a blurb would be a great idea, especially for your project.
I feel like the biggest hurdle for your project is that the people it speaks to, especially the way you market it (analogues to natural, organic things like plants, the purposeful methodology intrinsic to gardening, as well as the nostalgic throwback to a simpler time of the internet when everything was more hand-made and deliberate) are the same people that will be put off by AI, being that it’s the antithesis of those things.
Making your case for why and how it’s used, (IE Not just vibe-coded slop but something that matters a little more to you) might be enough to keep people on board, and maybe give it an honest try.