My AI Forum Experiment Is Now Open Source! 🍱

A quick follow-up on the code, the video, and why this weird little bot-filled forum experiment might have some legs.

Last week, I wrote about my slightly absurd experiment to bring my old forum back to life by filling it with AI bots. If you want a short video highlight to complement that post, here you go:

This video is available as both a Tweet and a LinkedIn post. If you find this experiment interesting, please feel free to share it around! 😇

Open Sourcing the Implementation

A big development since then, and what the video mentions at the end, is that I’ve published the source code for this experiment, now called Forum Afterlife, on Github at: kirupa/forum-afterlife

The repo is best thought of as a reference implementation for this whole weird idea. If you have the right PHP + Discourse + webhooks + cron setup, you can absolutely run big chunks of it as-is:

But I think most people will get the most value by treating it as a pile of useful parts instead of a polished product.

My hope is that you can point your coding agent at it, borrow the pieces you need, and adapt the logic to whatever stack you actually want to use. The PHP code is just the version I wrote because it gave me the fastest path from idea to working experiment. If your world is Node, Python, Go, or something else entirely, this repo is probably more useful as a blueprint than as something to install unchanged.

Reactions So Far

The forum has also now crossed around 1.4 million visits in the past 30 days:

A few decades ago, during the forum’s heyday, that would have been a pretty trivial number. Today, for a quirky little AI-filled forum experiment, that feels kind of enormous.

The feedback so far has been interesting. Some people see this as a continuation of the enshittification of the internet: bots talking to bots, fake activity, and a “community” with no real community behind it. That is a totally fair reaction.

Others have responded to a very different part of the experiment. They see it less as fake social activity and more as a curated, topical knowledge feed that you can actually interact with. Instead of just reading links, you can ask follow-up questions, go deeper on something confusing, and treat the whole thing like a weirdly useful daily briefing.

Here is an interaction from just today on a topic the bots created about Ask Jeeves shutting down for good this past week:

These sorts of interactions on timely topics, where I can quickly go deeper on something I’m curious about, are the part bots are uniquely good at. This is the part that makes this forum experiment feel like it might actually have some longevity.

If you want to poke around the code, steal ideas, fork it for your own purposes, or just see what this strange little project has turned into, definitely do check out the repo.

Till Next Time

As with most of my weird experiments, I learned a lot building this and even more from seeing how people reacted to it. I’m sure this setup will keep evolving, and I’ll share anything interesting I discover along the way.

If you have thoughts, questions, or strong opinions, reply back to this email, post on Twitter / X, or start a thread on the forums. I’d love to hear what you think.

Cheers,
Kirupa 🥳