I mean I get it. We are a project of the fediverse and we are supposed to support and use the fediverse tools. But actually, we do! We host our peertube (which is not that active lately), we are active on Mastodon, our blog is federated and we are having an eye on Lemmy. There are a lot interfaces to interact with us using activitypub.

But activitypub is a protocol for social networks, and although we like them, we are actually contributing to build one!, they don’t are a good fit in any situation. And the idea behind having a forum is actually one of these things, where some fediverse-software wont fit.

We want to have discussions with our active community members, we want to have place for longer discussions without any mechanics like upvoting, downvoting, non-temporary ordering or recursive thread depth. We need sufficient management of our members to have voting following our statutes. And actually we need a safe space for discussions where not everyone with an account anywhere can drop by and rants about whatever we do. We get quite some of these things via E-Mail, Matrix and the Fediverse and I did not noted something similar with Loomio or Flarum.

So, these are the reasons for us to pick Flarum, this is what our decision was (which was actually open for contributions by anyone and we asked for participation on our Mastodon). I might not have convinced you, but I hope you can understand our motivation. Thanks for your feedback and interest in Funkwhale! :)