

Show HN: We built a platform for forums and called it Microcosm - buro9
https://microco.sm/

======
buro9
Author here.

Microcosm is the first startup by us, and it's taken a while to get out of the
door as customer feedback changed our initial plan and most of our priorities.

The initial plan was to take forums and evolve them into a flipboard/Verge
style magazine of user-generated content. But actually people just wanted
really good forums that were more capable of providing tools that communities
needed. This mostly came down to "We want events and other stuff to be
organised where the people are hanging-out", and we found that the magazine
approach set expectations that people were consumers rather than creators of
content.

We are a Shopify or Tumblr, but for forums.

And the obvious question amongst the HN crowd is how do we stack up to
Discourse? The answer is that the forum market is _HUGE_ and we see Discourse
being the equivalent of a Wordpress (a comparison they themselves have made)
whilst we are the equivalent of Tumblr. We're a hosted platform obsessed with
simplicity for the admin and users, not an installable piece of software.

An example of what we're doing:
[http://forum.islington.cc/](http://forum.islington.cc/)

A forum on that site:
[http://forum.islington.cc/microcosms/114/](http://forum.islington.cc/microcosms/114/)
Note that events exist within forums and not in a separate global calendar.

An event page:
[http://forum.islington.cc/events/79/](http://forum.islington.cc/events/79/)

Another example: [http://forum.espruino.com/](http://forum.espruino.com/)

A conversation with images, code and video:
[http://forum.espruino.com/conversations/706/](http://forum.espruino.com/conversations/706/)

Ask me anything.

~~~
revorad
Congrats on the launch, David and team. Quick first impressions from trying
this out now:

1\. The Persona sign up surprised me a bit. I'm ok with it, but if you're
aiming at non-tech folks, it might be a bit of a problem. Do you offer a
normal email+pwd signup too?

2\. I chose a name for my forum and signed up with Persona. After logging in,
I'm expecting to see my forum, but this is what I see:
[http://i.imgur.com/lWG9Ta0.png](http://i.imgur.com/lWG9Ta0.png)

Not sure what to do, maybe I need to click "Add a site"? When I do, I realise
it's for creating another forum.

Oh I didn't know I was making an account which allowed me to make multiple
forums! Also, using "site" and "forum" interchangeably threw me off.

3\. Ok, so what I was first looking at after signing in was my dashboard. So
now I go back there, and I notice the tiny greyed out link babies.microco.sm.
Click on it and it takes me to:
[http://i.imgur.com/FI5HKPF.png](http://i.imgur.com/FI5HKPF.png)

"This is such a new site that there are no forums."

Now I'm really confused. A site has multiple forums?

So I'm not logged into my own forum? Click on Sign in or Register in the top
right corner.

Persona again! Now, as a forum owner nerd I might be ok with it, but other
users of my forum almost certainly won't be.

Anyway, sign in. Then click on "Create your first forum" and get these two
questions: [http://i.imgur.com/75GNpQ6.png](http://i.imgur.com/75GNpQ6.png)

"What is the name of the forum?" and "What is the forum about?"

But I thought I already answered these questions when I first signed up!! ->
[http://i.imgur.com/QirI0Sx.png](http://i.imgur.com/QirI0Sx.png)

Anyway, I do that and then my forum is finally created and I was able to make
a post and reply to it. The Microco.sm logo on my site/forum is confusing.
It'd be nicer if you used the name of my site by default instead.

That's probably enough for you to go on for the initial UX :)

Caveats: I've never run a forum and I'm unlikely to do so in the near future.
I did this purely as an exercise to try your app out. So, take it with a giant
boulder of salt.

~~~
buro9
You've raised some good points.

We're already changing the account dashboard as it's likely that most people
will only run 1 or 2 forums, so a list is not ideal. We're going to take you
straight to editing the forum colours and logo, rather than to the list of
sites. And if we keep a list it will only appear when a second site has been
created.

Agree on the bad interchangeable use of forum and site.

Persona is a strange one... every technical person raises it as an issue and
some get confused by part of the process, but no users have. We've got 70 year
old cyclists excited that it's the first time they've ever joined a community
and engaged with it, and 16 year olds equally joyous at just being somewhere
others who share their interest are. None raise Persona as an issue, but it
does keep coming up from technical people.

Given that Persona feels like it's in flux (recent HN item on it), we may re-
visit this to ensure that even the tech people are happy.

~~~
revorad
I'm surprised and happy to learn that non-techies don't mind Persona. Sorry
for going on about it.

------
Cthulhu_
"We only make money when your community is successful" scares me; would this
mean a forum like I own (with 500K pageviews / month) would end up paying out
of all kinds of unwanted orifices.

Glancing over the comparison, I'm noticing one possible discrepancy: "Default
legal documents to reduce your liability" are available in pretty much all
online services like these, the terms & conditions and the like. I know that
vBulletin also has forms for registration of minors and the like. I'm also
pretty sure those terms & conditions are tl;dr documents of legalese nobody
bothers to read though.

The software itself... it has pagination, woot. With the minimalistic style
and html (compared to vB / IVF) I think you could do with infinite scrolling
(optional depending on device, it's still kinda sucky on mobile) or something
clever like that.

I want to make a remark about the apparent lack of functionality, but that
would be unfair; I'm a vB user, the only things I use on there are just
reading and writing posts. vB forums like mine often do have a lot of user
post customization though; postbits with all kinds of information,
personalized (and larger) avatars, tl;dr signatures, custom post styles, that
kinda thing. It may sound trivial, but it's a form of self-expression a lot of
our users appreciate. See also: Tumblr's user's eyesore styles.

The events page is neat, and as far as I know not something the competitors
have in that form - looks like an unique selling point to me. Code / image /
video embedding is also neat.

~~~
buro9
> "We only make money when your community is successful" scares me; would this
> mean a forum like I own (with 500K pageviews / month) would end up paying
> out of all kinds of unwanted orifices.

Damn that phrase, now changed.

This is actually one of the more subtle and interesting things. Our business
model is based on two things we know:

1) Communities already create transactions and revenue as a by-product of
conversations and engagement

2) The majority of forums never break even and are a cost-centre

When looking at which problems forum owners want solving, aside from the
technical things (installing, updating, security, backup, configuration), and
the social things (engagement, search, features, schisms, moderation and
permissions), the recurring concern is that forums seldom to never pay for
themselves.

The thing we're fixing with our business model is just that... how to make a
forum financially viable to the site admin and the users.

We do this predominantly by pushing down the costs by having a platform with
efficient software and design.

But we also do it by recognising that solving some of the problems "Our
community wants events but right now they're on Facebook, EventBrite, Meetup
and Google Calendar" helps to return some of the externalised transactions
back to where the community is.

We plan to charge service fees, as per eBay or Meetup, for things like selling
tickets to events, or for helping to handle payments for classifieds.

No user of a forum that isn't selling something is going to be paying, and nor
are you as the site admin (except the low flat-rate fee for owning the site).

But we will add features to help bring more transactions back into the
community and where others (you or your users) make money from those we'll
charge service fees for facilitating them.

It's the difference between pushing down the costs aggressively and helping
forums make money through transactions, that is where we believe our actual
revenue will be. We really think that by entangling our success with your
success means that we have to make the right product for the forum users and
forum admins. We can't just sell you hosting and walk away from you... we have
to make sure every user is happy and your engagement stays high... we need to
make sure the UX is awesome.

On the legal docs, we asked our lawyers to draft three documents that help
protect site admins from various things: [https://github.com/microcosm-
cc/legal](https://github.com/microcosm-cc/legal)

Namely, we've designed the documents to work with sites that have reactive
moderation to ensure that the site admin isn't liable for defamation, slander,
fraud by users, bullying, etc.

This is going way further than other forums with just a COPPA doc and a
template privacy policy, we've looked at the risks a forum admin is exposed to
and specifically are addressing those. We are protecting our customers, not
just us. Though our ability to do this is limited, you can choose to apply
your own legal terms and remove any protection our documents offer you.

On pagination, we've design it with infinite scroll in mind. All UX feedback
to date has preferred pages so that is what we've gone with. We suspect that
when we get to a native mobile app infinite scroll will be back.

I'm a vB user too, I run [http://www.lfgss.com](http://www.lfgss.com) amongst
others. The minimalism is by-design on Microcosm, users like their own
expression but not necessarily that of others. Humans are great like that.
We've chosen to keep the content clean, the conversations and events, but to
allow a comment area on the profile page where literally anything can be
inserted. So far, it's the best balance we've found for this, but it will be
revisited when we have a wider diversity of interests covered by the forums we
host... it will give us a better understanding of how people in different
interest verticals want to express and distinguish themselves.

Events is just the first of the structured types of content that will be in a
forum. We hope to make the other types as good as we've made our first-bash of
the event type. Though we have to solve recurring events first.

Thanks for all the feedback, and let me know what you think about that first
set of things re: service fees and our business model. It's definitely
something that has raised questions, we know we are not the right product for
the top few % of forums in the world, but we've received a lot of very
enthusiastic feedback from mid-sized forums that have between 50 and 500 peak
concurrent users that this is something they love about us.

------
luckyisgood
Looks good!

I'm looking at the pricing table here:
[https://microco.sm/compare/](https://microco.sm/compare/) . The plan that is
highlighted by default to me has a price in British pounds while all other s
have prices in US dollars. Consider changing that.

~~~
buro9
Thanks.

And I've just changed it to a dollar amount.

Here's hoping deploying that landing site under load won't break anything.

------
jeswin
If you're asking for the community's help, you should not have this in the
TOS.

 _" access all or any part of the Service in order to build a product or
service which competes with the Service;"_

I have been working on an open-source forum platform for a while now. I do not
intend to copy anything or break your TOS. Haven't used your app yet, please
delete my account.

Honestly, I am a little upset that you chose to put such a thing in the TOS.
Maybe you just copied some template, in which case please update it.

~~~
buro9
Hey jeswin,

Thanks for catching that.

We actually put our legals under source control to help find flaws, answer
questions about them, resolve issues and to make it easier to see changes over
time.

[https://github.com/microcosm-cc/legal/](https://github.com/microcosm-
cc/legal/)

I hadn't seen that particular clause and agree with you. I'm fine with you or
anyone else, who is working on anything else, accessing and using the service
even if you are a competitor.

It's an error on my part as the lawyers have included that as a default phrase
and I do not agree with it either. We've even open-sourced the frontend under
a license that would conflict with this clause: [https://github.com/microcosm-
cc/microweb](https://github.com/microcosm-cc/microweb)

I'm speaking to the lawyers again on Monday, and will raise a Github issue for
it to ensure it's resolved.

It will be dealt with, that is _not_ how I want our terms to be, and my
apologies for not catching that specific clause when I reviewed the documents.

David

PS: The issue: [https://github.com/microcosm-
cc/legal/issues/1](https://github.com/microcosm-cc/legal/issues/1)

------
vasuadiga
How stable is the platform? Would you consider providing social login in
future?

A couple of observations: 1) the double pop-up for posting a reply (right hand
top) and Start a conversation is bad UX, IMHO. 2) the urls (of forums and
conversations) aren't SEO friendly. Is it possible to change this?

~~~
buro9
The platform is stable. Most of our investment to this point was in building a
very solid foundation. We're using Postgres + S3 for storage and Go for the
API. So our core is built on solid technologies that are well known and
established, with only Go being a potentially risky bet as it is relatively
young.

On your observations:

#1 Were you not signed in? Is this the sign-in popup? We don't use pop-ups
anywhere except for the sign-in dialog that uses Persona. If this is the issue
then it is one more thing to add to the now growing list of things we'd like
to improve about how the Persona UX integrates with ours.

#2 We know that we _will_ add more SEO oriented URLs, but this will require us
doing it once and never changing how we do it. Which basically means that we
want more content and to analyse that content to determine the most optimal
strategy for building those URLs.

Google and others penalise harder for duplicate URLs reaching the same content
than they reward for nice SEO friendly URLs. So when we do this, it will be
done in a way that constructs a canonical SEO friendly URL for content and
that is the one and only URL that will ever reach the content.

We need to get this right when we do it, because it will affect placement to
make changes once it's done. We know that during the life of a forum content
is moved, edited, and some content has liability in a title and we need to
provide a way for that to change.

What I'm saying is that content is temporal and URLs are permanent. Whatever
our strategy we need to strike the right balance here without making the UX
weird for the end users.

In the meantime we are focusing our effort on ensuring that the HTML we
produce is marked-up well, such that headers and titles are given due
prominence, that we use schema.org microformats, etc. And we will soon add an
API for sitemaps.xml files.

We'll help your content get indexed, we'll help you stay indexed, we'll help
the unindexed content be discovered... but what we aren't going to do is rush
in and create a potential fragility or weakness with the content that is
already indexed.

