The Reddit-style presentation of topics and ranking comments isn’t really conducive to lengthy, quality discussions that persist over a period of time. The Reddit-style works for following current events and posting links to new things etc, but as a result, old topics - topics even a couple of days old - falls off the engagement radar. Once it’s gone from the front page, it’s gone from people’s consciousness. This is bad for a small community with few posts that value quality of discussions over blind sharing of links. For instance, say I create a topic called “share your favorite vegan recipes” - I may get some replies in the first couple of days, but then the topic will fall off the frontpage and completely die. This is further exacerbated by the voting system. On Reddit/Lemmy, topics and comments which have a higher number of votes get more visibility, and this creates two issues - one is it encourages group think and creates an echo chamber, the other is that it drowns out less popular topics or comments. This sort of intentional drowning of posts and comments actually may be a good thing - and even necessary - on high-userbase systems like Reddit, where a single thread could have thousands of comments - but it works against low-traffic communities like Beehaw, where every comment is valuable (unless it’s off-topic/spam etc of course).

Whereas in a traditional forum:

• A topic gets bumped to the top when someone posts a comment, which encourages threads to live longer
• There’s not as much importance given to the “newness” of a post
• The lack of votes on a topic would give equal importance to all topics
• The lack of votes on comments would encourage people to actually chime in if they agree or disagree with a comment, instead of just blindly voting
• Forums also allow you to show a categorized homepage, where you can have several sub-forums appear on the homepage all at once. This is a better approach than blindly unifying the entire feed in one page, because this allows threads in low-traffic subs to keep their visibility and compete against high-traffic subs. For instance, consider a current news sub which may get a lot of posts ever single day, vs a niche sub such as gardening. With a unified feed, you’d almost never see posts from a gardening sub, unless you went into that sub.

With all the above reasons, forums are therefore more conducive for encouraging discussions, over a place which simply acts like a feed aggregator. Traditional forums are the solution to the doomscrolling issues that plague modern social media. Plus, they offer better moderation tools, with better granular permissions granted to mods, so you could grant various levels of access. Also, you can place several restrictions on users to reduce spam, for instance, you could grant a user rights to post a topic only after they’ve read all the rules, and maybe participated in a quiz or something. You could grant additional rights to people who’ve gotten a certain number posts in their bag. You could have a “trusted poster” system where a user could have mod-like abilities. There’s so many ways a forum is a lot more flexible than a system like Lemmy.

So overall, I think Beehaw’s ethos and vision would align better with a traditional forum, over a feed-aggregator style forum like Lemmy.