I’ve subscribed to Commonplace for a long time but have always found it difficult to keep up with discussions in these forums - so I’d like to know how y’all do it. Do you keep a forum browser window open? Set up push notifications? Use an app?
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I open it every day. 
I am clearly biased, but when the options are Twitter (ugh) and LinkedIn (ugh) I reliably get more out of this forum than other platforms. (I don’t have Instagram on my phone, and I don’t have a Facebook account). The stuff that @justin has been sharing recently, for instance, has been reliably thought provoking.
And to be absolutely honest, if it wasn’t for needing to use LinkedIn and Twitter as marketing channels for Commoncog, there is probably no reason for me to even be on those platforms. I get so little value from what I find and read there that it’s almost a joke. Like, at most, I get … one interesting idea or link through Twitter? Almost never on LinkedIn. Increasingly, I find myself more and more involved in group chats — and this forum, of course.
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I have a tab open both on my work and personal computer. Which doesn’t mean I check it every day, whether I do or not depends on how much headspace I have.
Like Cedric, I get more good ideas from here than from LinkedIn (the only Social Media platform I am still checking for professional reasons).
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Given a choice between LinkedIn, Twitter (and sometimes even Substack) and Commoncog, I visit this forum everyday (I actually got a badge for people who visit 365-day consecutively or something) 
. Not that I can absorb everything everybody’s saying, since I don’t think I understand more than 60-70% of what’s going on most threads (but hey, getting to see how people above my caliber discuss is a blessing).
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One of us! One of us! 
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I have a pinned tab for this forum in the browser of every computer I use and look at it virtually every morning. I find the discussions here far more interesting than any social media site I am aware of. That said, I would find value in a daily email digest of all forum posts if that were an option (if it is, I haven’t figured out how to set it up).
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I can subscribe to Peter’s situation. I have been a member for a while too but I struggle to get back to the forum.
Occasionally, I tend to be reminded by the summary of recent topics email from CommonCog.
While I agree to everyone’s sentiment about the quality of the conversations in this forum compared to other social media, I still find it hard to engage with it.
@cedric, have you considered a better platform than the one you currently use? If so, what would be the argument for staying here?
Fun fact, I am part of the Small Bets community from Vasallo (now part of Gumroad) and we had the exact issue brought up among members. They subscribed to some Basecamp dogma back in the day and moved the community to a self-hosted chat product by Basecamp called Campfire. Needless to say, its a shitty product and far worse UX than Discord. Recently Sahil made a poll and most people voted to move outside of it, albeit voters were split between Discord, Slack and Circle, to name a few alternatives.
I am not sure what the solution might be here, for me creating pinned tabs isn’t one. With that argument, I might as well pin everything I should visit that I don’t.
D3
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I selected Discourse for a few reasons:
- I wanted async interaction, so that busy professionals can choose to interact with this forum on their own schedule, not on the realtime schedule of a group chat. That rules out Slack and Discord.
- I want a platform where information can live forever, and continue to be useful to members even years later. This means Wiki functionality, powerful search, and also rules out chat even more.
- I wanted the company producing the software to be sustainable, and not likely to be acquired and enshittify. It’s unclear to me whether Circle or Discourse comes out ahead here — Discourse strikes me as better run, but I could be mistaken.
- I have built (or helped built) three communities in my life. I ran a forum in secondary school, was part of the 9Rules blogging community, and helped create the Web Fiction Guide more than a decade ago. When I reviewed the moderation functionality, Discourse had far and away the most powerful set of features. This was important to me, because I’ve dealt with many problematic personalities on previous forums.
- I treat this forum as a place to polish ideas that may or may not make it to the Commoncog publication. Members get first dibs, if you will. So data sovereignty is super important to me, and Discourse is open source, and in fact I run this software on my server, on top of a database that I control.
In sum, I’ve spent quite a fair bit of time thinking through this platform choice. The fact that you don’t engage except when you have the time (or when there’s a particular topic you want to discuss) is a win in my eyes. Commoncog is, after all, a community of competent doers, and I would expect no less.
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For most users, an email digest is probably the easiest option for reminders. You can adjust the frequency under Activity Summary in your preferences (that is a magic link which works for anyone).
Alternately, numerous RSS feeds are available for topics, tags, and categories – e.g. https://forum.commoncog.com/latest.rss?order=created will show all new topics as they are created.
There are more outré options with plugins, like ActivityPub or AI-generated summaries over Telegram.
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Thanks for this @schleifer , I was just going to ask about RSS feeds! I’ve recently bought an e-ink reader (Boox Go) and my main use case alongside e-books is a way to consume CommonCog content in an easy format away from my laptop or phone.
I have used that CommonCog latest topics RSS feed before, for Readwise Reader, but it doesn’t pull everything in — quite random which topics appear and which don’t.
Also the RSS link on the bottom of the CommonCog homepage doesn’t work, just routes here.
I would love to be able to read members only articles via RSS in Reader (on my Boox) as well as the latest topics in the forum. How do I go about doing this?
E.g. Stratechery used to have a members-only RSS feed so you could read paywalled posts in via RSS in Reader or equivalent.
Apologies if this is a stupid question!
cc @cedric
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So I started looking into this thanks to your post, and I realised that it actually IS possible if we use a paid service called FeedPress, combined with Outpost.
We’ll look to implement this, I think. I’ve been thinking about building a custom solution for awhile, and this will save us development time + costs.
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Funny - I had thought about pointing you to 404 media but wasn’t sure if it would apply. Glad it does, and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes of it. This may be the thing that solves my “keeping up with the articles” problem.
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