Don't contribute anything relevant in web forums (2020)

You might be tempted to say some of the following: - But Reddit has an API, and lots of third-party clients! - But you can just use https://old.reddit.com or https://i.reddit.com instead! The problem is that the user-hostile trends of current Reddit (e.g. locking the user out and prompting them to install an app) make it apparent that most of these workarounds and such are going to be made invalid in, say, the next 5 years. Even if they do survive…

> Typically, those services don't provide any possibility to extract or synchronize content. They don't offer open APIs that allow users to choose among different and open user interfaces. None of this is true. All these services have pretty fully-featured APIs and several independent clients. Even otherwise, the fact that some of them may not exist at some point in the future is a terrible reason to not use them at all. I still find tons of relevant content in…

> My message to all those authors is: don't use web-based forums. While his message is certainly relevant for _most_ forum software, i feel compelled to point out one which enables anyone to clone the whole forum, in full, and sync it at will for local use (with two-way sync if the remote admin enables that (on a per-account basis)). https://fossil-scm.org Though fossil is an SCM/DVCS, one of its features is a built-in forum in active use by both the…