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PanArab ,

At least the Fediverse exists.

nl4real ,

I actually went out and looked up a bunch of forums after the Reddit controversy last year. They’re slow, but I actually feel comfortable just browsing through and only posting if I feel like I can actually contribute. I would definitely recommend just going out and hunting for boards relevant to your interests.

grrgyle ,

Shootout to doomworld. I think that software is Discourse. Anyway they’ve always had a vibrant communities

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

SomethingAwful is still around. As are a lot of niche forums like XDA. We also have Lemmy and other non-corporate ran social media.

iopq ,

Unfortunately, I don’t have ten bucks

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

i never wanted to pay for that either lol

TexMexBazooka ,

Unfortunately here’s the reality: if you want something specific, you’ll probably have to pay for it

Smokeless7048 ,

I just found that Runescape shut down its forums, replacing it with a discord.

Look, i love my clans discord, and my discord with friends, but one for a game like that is nearly unusable.

NOPper ,

Aww shit.

ryannathans ,

We have a forum at 2009scape.org

HelixDab2 ,

I dunno, when you’re talking about really specialized niches, there are still plenty of forums. Like, 600rr.net; it’s dedicated to nothing but Honda CBR600RR motorcycles. If you have a problem with a 600RR, the answer is probably there, and the forum is still ticking along because it’s just too hard to find those super-niche answers on Reddit. Want gun content with a healthy dose of homo/transphobia and christian nationalism? AR15.com has you covered. Want to talk about the minutiae of reloading and be autistically-focused on long-range accuracy? SnipersHide.com is your place. (They’re a bit fuddy though.)

Pantherina ,

Discourse is awesome. Just needs federation.

As a mod, it is lovely to work with, extremely well indexed, has tags, categories, roles and everything you want.

Everything should be done there. Matrix or Discord make no sense, its just chatting into nirvana, nobody every finds it again

And people… dont… use… threads! They just spam everything in a single chat which makes it unusable

FaceDeer ,
@FaceDeer@fedia.io avatar

There's an ActivityPub plugin, though I haven't tried it - just Googled it up now. Looks very new and rough.

kandoh ,

Honestly, the layout and formatting of forums just isn’t as good as the way comments are sorted and how they can spawn side discussions like on Reddit or Lemmy.

racemaniac ,

Isn’t the main difference just that forums are focused on longer discussions, and reddit/lemmy are focused on a constant stream of content?

I’d prefer forums for a lot of my interests, a well managed forum will contain long in depth discussion regarding important topics that the likes of lemmy/reddit/discord either don’t, or if they do, good luck finding it. If however you just want to visit it in the morning and see something different than you saw yesterday, yeah for just raw speed of content, forums suck.

But is that really better?

kandoh ,

I think maybe the forums give the illusion of a longer discussion because a low effort reply is given the same weight as a really in-depth reply post.

It bumps the post back up to the top too so that kind of encourages continued discussion in a way Reddit posts don’t. So that’s a benefit to forums.

christophski ,

I’ve said this before, the thing I hate about reddit and discord is that you only get exposed to “current” threads or “top” threads. On old forums everything was just there and if someone commented on it, it came back to the top and re-ignited conversations.

I was a big user of the command and conquer forums and I definitely miss the community of it. But that may just be the scale of Internet then compared to now. Back then you saw the same users every day and we ended up chatting on msn and working on projects together. I couldn’t tell you any users on my instance or elsewhere other than the admins of my instance.

NuXCOM_90Percent , (edited )

As someone who very much “grew up” on vbulletins and irc for better or for worse, I miss this.

But also… I am not sure if them going away is a bad thing. Small message boards only really worked when people, generally, did not care about moderation. Specifically moderation of hate and the like. Because when you are "a small group of friends’, it is a lot easier to ignore the guy with “weird vibes”. Same with the people who went out of their way to “keep women out” by insisting on making their signature images so horny that even a diehard Fairy Tail fan would blush.

But, as many of us saw, as those boards get larger? Now you need real moderators. Just having the guy who hosts it in his parents’ basement delete the worst stuff no longer works and now they are asking their friends to be mods. And you basically get the same problem people still complain about on discord where you get very cliquey communities and incredibly biased moderation.

And it inevitably leads to boards either becoming a cesspool of hatred, selling the board to an internet company, or just saying “Fuck all y’all” and shutting it down overnight.

And even stuff like legacy tech support or technical knowledge? Those are already a mess of the top result being some greybeard asshole talking about how OP is a jerk and this is a common problem and they should search for it. Or we have the stack overflow problem where the accepted answer is actually wrong.

But also? For living software, bugs change over time. And plenty of times I have found exactly my symptoms/behavior and… it is for something that was fixed three years ago. So I am now looking at a different bug with the exact same symptoms and basically every search engine is worthless.

And… going back to the moderation aspect: One of the biggest Looking Glass Games or Unreal fansites in existence was still MAYBE a hundred or so people who knew it existed and a couple dozen who cared enough to hang out at the forums. Now? The fansite for a mod for the latest Microprose game is one google search away and might get name dropped by an influencer and have thousands of people swarm overnight. Let alone anyone who gets targeted by the latest hate campaign. There are no “small” communities that aren’t private and spun out of larger ones.

So… I dunno. I very much miss the good old days. But I also increasingly understand those weren’t all that “good”. And communities are so ephemeral that they map well to a discord or even a reddit that people rage delete a few months later.

0x0 ,

Small message boards only really worked when people, generally, did not care about moderation.

Or had ticker skins and just /ignored assholes.

Buelldozer ,
@Buelldozer@lemmy.today avatar

Or had ticker skins and just /ignored assholes.

That was the answer right there. Stuff the assholes in your ignore list and forget that they exist. Too many people on the internet are wanna-be cops out to police everyone else’s ideas, language, or tone. The other person in a dispute is always a Commie or a Fascist and needs to be silenced as quickly and brutally as possible.

The internet wasn’t for normies and making it easy for them to participate was a serious mistake.

expatriado ,

i miss the specialized topic forums, the only downside was I needed to create a separate account for each website

0x0 ,

Use a password manager, you should.

cyberpunk007 ,

I think they mean SSO. While not as privacy friendly, SSO means you use one set of creds for multiple places.

PlasticExistence ,

Talk like Yoda, you do

HeyThisIsntTheYMCA ,
@HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world avatar

Fora used to be great support groups for medical conditions. I helped run one with an RN. It was tough work keeping the trolls out, but we were also a great resource. Eventually, social media moved on. Que será.

KryptonNerd ,

I was very happy to find when I was getting involved in a project that it was mostly organised/discussed on their forum, it makes it so much nicer and more accessible

LodeMike ,

Discord is not a forum lol

rimjob_rainer ,

Then why are people using it as one?

LodeMike ,

Because they hate themselves /s

HeyThisIsntTheYMCA ,
@HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world avatar

Two things can be true

TexMexBazooka ,

Because it’s convenient

DNAmaster10 ,

I know of a couple Discord servers with “help” channels being used to completely replace forums which would have served the same purpose back in the day. Not sure if that’s what it’s talking about.

Romkslrqusz ,

Discord has evolved from more or less being a series of chatrooms (like IRC) to having “threads” that work a lot like how a forum would typically be used.

In the repair community, a lot of conversation about component level repair has moved to Discord channels. Sites like badcaps.net or the Rossmann group forums have comparatively low usage. Nested away in Discord, this information doesn’t show up in search engine results and can’t be archived by web crawlers. When a Discord server is deleted or made private, that information is forever lost.

rwhitisissle ,

And both of those things SUUUUUCK.

yournamehere ,

remember myspace? thats what reddit is. an ancient webartifact.

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