Looking for feedback on my discussion forum.
Looking for some preliminary feedback on my discussion forum for people working or impacted by the Health and Safety field. I created a couple fake accounts and posted sample questions/comments. Let me know what you guys think, and where it can be improved:
https://www.safetyknights.com/
Also - it's hosted on the free tier of Heroku for now, so if it loads slowly initially it's probably because the app went to "sleep". I'll upgrade to the paid tier when I launch. Thanks guys!
Trending on Indie Hackers
I like the colours and the look & feel seems pretty responsive.
One options (that Indie Hackers with a similar layout could consider) is a grid layout where the left column is "popular" and the right column is "newest". Then on smaller screens and mobile they either join as you currently have it or go vertical. That means 1 less click to see popular vs. newest posts.
Finally, something I suggested to Indie Hackers a while ago is to build the community platform as "replicable". So then if someone else comes along and says "there's a need for a community of X" then you can simply replicate the existing community, they pay you a hosting/maintenance subscription, and the customer acts as the community manager/moderator. It becomes a hosted no-code community platform.
Hope that helps,
Thank you sir! I will play with the dual columns idea. On larger screens there is definitely empty space that can be better utilized.
As for your second recommendation - you're saying to have a feature that allows users to create their own subgroup (but still be under the safetyknights domain)?
For the second rec, I was suggesting platform/community as a service. So, let's say I believe there is a need for a community of "people in Florida who like sewing". I as a grandma don't know how to code so can pay you $5/month, you register a new domain and create a new copy of Safety Knights. You get income and I get the iterative improvements that you are applying to Safety Knights anyway; win-win.
Now granted, in theory, this is what Facebook does. But the need is obviously not being met if places like Indie Hackers and Safety Knights are popping up. But so far everyone is building a new community platform from scratch so you have to be a developer to host your own community and there's a lot of duplicate effort. Imagine for you as a developer if your starting point was to replicate the Indie Hacker repo, it would have sped up your own development.
@Lakebed_io been thinking about "community as a service" as well. What would you say are the top 3 problems such a service would address?
That's a hard question that I've thought a lot about too. Some thoughts:
1.) Moderation and spam reduction - Critical for everything these days.
2.) I think Indie Hackers' use of date joined and "points" on profiles is a good social capital system and essentially adds credibility to posts of people who have legitimately been involved in the community.
3.) Multiple login methods - By being independent of the big guys a startup can allow people to register/login with email or with existing social login or with Gmail. I hear so many people say "I want to be a part of X community but I don't want a Facebook account".
4.) Sandboxed data - If I am part of XYZ community, my activity and data stays within that community. Similar to WordPress in that if I comment on a WP post other WP sites can't see that activity.
5.) Easy setup - Mastodon social exists but you have to own your own server and be tech-savvy to set it up.
6.) Private communities - Facebook has private groups and I think that's a good option to offer.
I can probably think of a lot more given time...
@Lakebed_io agree with all of these points, esp. the desire for more private communities which manifests into spam reduction, higher signal social capital, etc.
What's your opinion of the community platforms like Tribe.so, Discourse, etc?