About

From Forums to Chat: The Evolution of Online Community Platforms

The landscape of online communities has undergone a remarkable transformation over the past few decades. From the early days of text-based forums to today's real-time chat platforms, the way we connect and communicate online has evolved significantly.

Early Online Forums

In the 1990s and early 2000s, online forums were the primary hubs for community interaction. These text-based platforms allowed users to post topics, reply to threads, and engage in asynchronous discussions. Forums like phpBB and vBulletin dominated this era, fostering niche communities around shared interests.

Some companies were able to leverage these old school platforms to build communities around their products and mission, but it wasn't easy, and now a lot of that work has been lost inside these old, antiquated ghost towns.

Social Media Platforms

The mid-2000s saw the rise of social media giants like MySpace and Facebook. These platforms revolutionized online interaction by introducing personal profiles, friend networks, and more visual forms of communication. They expanded the concept of online communities from interest-based to personal connections.

Companies started being active on these platforms to build communities, but the social networks owned the users and the data.

Modern Chat and Messaging Apps

As internet speeds increased and smartphones became ubiquitous, real-time communication apps gained popularity. Platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord blurred the lines between personal messaging and community engagement, offering instant, multimedia-rich interactions.

During the pandemic especially, companies started shifting to these more private spaces to build communities because they could no longer rely just on the chaotic social networks. But just like with the social networks, these chat platforms owned the users and the data.

Community-Focused Platforms

Recent years have seen a resurgence of dedicated community platforms. Sites like Reddit combine elements of traditional forums with modern social media features. Meanwhile, platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams have brought community-style interactions into professional settings.

But companies, by this time, have learned that they can't rely on these centralized platforms to build their communities. They need to own their own data and users, and be able to keep them forever without per user pricing and monthly subscription lock-in.

Once.com, Campfire, Keep Community and the future of online communities

The latest evolution in online community platforms is marked by a shift away from the Software as a Service (SaaS) model, championed by companies like 37signals with their Once.com initiative. This approach represents a return to software ownership rather than rental, challenging the dominant subscription-based model of recent years.

Once.com introduces a new line of software products that users pay for once and own forever. This model allows businesses to regain control over their software, data, and infrastructure. Campfire, one of Once.com's products, exemplifies this philosophy by offering a simple, self-hosted group chat system similar to Slack or Microsoft Teams, but without recurring charges. It provides basic functionality like rooms, @mentions, and direct messages, while giving users full ownership of their data and the ability to customize the software.

Keep Community builds upon Campfire's foundation, addressing the needs of growing online communities. It adds crucial features such as email notifications, OAuth signup and login, closed signup options, subscription and payment integration, a members page, public marketing pages, and content moderation tools. Keep Community positions itself as an alternative to platforms like Slack and Discord, which have limitations on message history or are designed primarily for specific user groups like gamers.

This shift towards owned, self-hosted community platforms reflects a growing desire for data ownership, privacy, and customization in online interactions. It challenges the notion that perpetual subscriptions are necessary for quality software and community management. By offering one-time payment options and providing access to the source code, these platforms empower users to have greater control over their online communities.

The future of online communities may see a balance between cloud-based services and self-hosted solutions, with an increased emphasis on data ownership and privacy. As businesses and communities become more aware of the long-term costs and limitations of subscription-based services, we may see a resurgence of self-hosted, customizable platforms that prioritize user control and data ownership while still offering robust features for community engagement and management.