“succeed” perhaps isn’t the right word. I like the CBB and have no intentions of leaving. My only gripe is that it runs on a rather old platform. The problem I have with social media is that it doesn’t foster long-lasting conversations. Ironically you CAN achieve a traditional forum experience on Lemmy simply by sorting posts in a community by latest comment and choosing the “chat” option within a thread, but even though they’re trivially easy to select, since they’re not the defaults nobody will bother. The default options favor novelty, so older topics get buried quickly.

But there are lots of ideas that social media brings to the table that I think enhance the forum experience without robbing it of its more cozy character.

In the end, though, my motivation is 80% wanting to improve my sysadmin skills and 20% wanting to create a community. Like how do I manage software updates, backups, migration, provisioning more resources, etc. Since I’m so green when it comes to administration, I’d suggest not using an email address or using a throwaway, and of course using proper password hygiene goes without saying.

Regarding tags, my intention was to start out with a single category and let community usage dictate which topics deserve their own categories. When I was on the Minecraft forums back in 2011, I was annoyed by how granular the forum structure was.