The forums
The Maemo forum was talk.maemo.org, a vBulletin board that began life in 2005 as the independent site Internet Tablet Talk and was folded into maemo.org under its later name around 2008, and it is still online and still readable, which is why old links into it usually resolve.
Three forums hold nearly the whole conversational record of this platform, one per era. Knowing which era a thread belongs to tells you which site to look in, and that is the fastest way to find something you half remember. The wider picture of who these people were and what they built sits in The community record; this page is about the boards themselves.
talk.maemo.org and what is still readable there
talk.maemo.org is still readable in full, and what is readable there is the whole Maemo-era discussion, covering the Nokia 770 of 2005, the N800, the N810 and above all the N900 of November 2009, which generated more traffic than the rest combined. The board started outside Nokia as Internet Tablet Talk, founded by an enthusiast rather than the vendor, and it kept that character after it was brought under the maemo.org name: device support threads, application announcement threads that ran for hundreds of pages, flashing and recovery guides, and the long arguments about Nokia’s direction that turned out to be justified.
What is still readable there is nearly all of the text. What is not readable is a large share of the attachments and screenshots, because they were posted to image hosts that have since closed, and a large share of the download links, because they pointed at package repositories that moved or were retired. Reading a 2010 thread now generally means reading the discussion and ignoring the links.
together.jolla.com in the Sailfish era
together.jolla.com was the Sailfish-era venue between 2014 and 2019, and it was not really a forum. It ran on Askbot, so it was structured as questions, answers and votes rather than threads, and it was used deliberately by Jolla as a feature request and defect channel: users posted a request, the community voted on it, and the company responded in the same place. That produced a useful and searchable record of what people asked for, and a slightly odd one, since the format discouraged the sprawling conversation that talk.maemo.org had been built for.
It was retired when the Discourse-based replacement opened in 2019. The material is no longer the live venue and parts of it are best reached through the Internet Archive rather than the original address, so a link into together.jolla.com from an old blog post is the one class of link on this subject most likely to fail.
forum.sailfishos.org now
forum.sailfishos.org is now the active board, opened in 2019 on Discourse, and it carries the current conversation about the platform: release announcements and their long comment threads, community ports to Android hardware, application development, and the periodic survey and feedback threads Jolla runs. Discussion of current hardware, including The Jolla C2, happens there rather than anywhere else, and it is the practical place to find out whether a given port supports the camera or the mobile network before spending a weekend on it.
It is the only one of the three where posting is a reasonable thing to do. The other two are archives with the lights left on.
The three boards compared
The three boards compared side by side differ in software, in period and in what they were for, and the differences matter mainly because they decide where a given question was asked.
| Board | Software | Active period | What it covers | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| talk.maemo.org | vBulletin | 2005 to roughly 2015 | 770, N800, N810, N900, MeeGo and the N9 | Online, effectively an archive |
| together.jolla.com | Askbot | 2014 to 2019 | Sailfish OS requests, defects and votes | Retired; use the Internet Archive |
| forum.sailfishos.org | Discourse | 2019 onward | Sailfish releases, ports, development, hardware | Active |
How to find an old thread
To find an old thread, work from the era backwards rather than typing the subject into a general search engine and hoping, because indexing of all three boards has decayed badly and the useful pages are rarely the ones that rank.
- Identify the era from the device: a 770, N800, N810 or N900 question belongs to talk.maemo.org, a 2014 to 2019 Sailfish question to together.jolla.com, anything later to forum.sailfishos.org.
- Search the board’s own search first, since it indexes post bodies that external engines dropped years ago.
- Restrict a general search to the single domain if the board search fails, using a site restriction rather than adding the board name as a keyword.
- Paste the dead address into the Internet Archive Wayback Machine when a link returns nothing, and pick a capture from the year the thread was active.
- Check the maemo.org wiki and Bugzilla for the same subject, because how-to material was often copied out of a thread and into the wiki, where it was maintained afterwards.
- Expect the binaries to be gone even when the thread survives, and treat any file you do find on a third party mirror as unverified.
Where else the conversation happened
The conversation also happened in four places that were never forums, and old threads refer to them constantly. The maemo.org Bugzilla carried defect discussion that was frequently more detailed than the forum version of the same problem. Mailing lists, including the developer list, carried the architectural arguments. IRC channels carried the day-to-day help, on freenode during the Maemo years and on Libera.Chat after the 2021 split, and almost none of that is logged anywhere public, which is a real gap in the record. Planet Maemo aggregated the developers’ own blogs, and those posts often survive on the authors’ personal sites after the aggregator stopped pulling them.
This site is an independent reference. It is not talk.maemo.org, not maemo.org, not Jolla and not the news blog that used this domain between 2009 and 2015. It does not mirror or reproduce anyone’s forum posts: where a board is still online, the board is where those posts should be read, with their authors’ names attached.