Yeah, forums were pretty cool!

I actually just launched a PHPBB forum for specific interests in regards to the indie web, building websites, and sharing random banter (among a few other things). I find Reddit and Lemmy to be useful for seeing what’s going on in the world overall, and Discord has mostly just been annoying ever since its launch, and forums seem like a good answer to recreating actual communities. And if there are more people who feel this way, maybe they’ll make a comeback (because they definitely haven’t just started to be affected by corporations attempting to centralize everyone to one thing).

Forums are where I learned literally everything about technology I know now. Every hack, jailbreak, method of bypassing something, building, literally anything I’ve done around my tech hobbies. Pi hole, emulation in the late 90s, how to use Photoshop, how to run Linux from a USB, everything I’ve learned from forums. I’m sad to think that me joining certain discords help deliver the death knell to the concept of forums.

I honestly don’t think Internet forum will ever loose itself. You will always always have small amount of people who will migrate to smaller forums for whatever topic or subject that they are interested in. Yes it might seem like discord and Reddit might appear to be the major forums of today’s modern age of communication under the title of forums.

People will always migrate and do whatever means to obtain freedom of speech. If Reddit and discord, well Reddit that I actually know of continue to perm ban or ban because of a word that our overlords aka moderators ban, because they are drunk with power and micromanage their sub Reddit then it’ll die. It will take time but forums like Lemmy and IRC (I know this ages me.) which still exist today, will never die. People just are not aware that other forums exist. They just have to do a little research or stumble upon it by accident which is how I found Lemmy. I was familiar with the term fediverse, but just never really looked into it.

So there’s hope. Humans are peculiar and interesting. We are highly intelligent, and I will always lean on the fact that we are tenacious and we never lack in ingenuity. They can never control our creativity and imagination. If something tries to monopolizes and put us in a box, there’s always a rebel creating a door for some of us to escape.

“Now”? Try 10 years ago, at the very least.

Me when I’m fucking banned from some Linux .org forum for no reason (did not read or make a post or even login)

ermmmmm contact the web admins 🤓 how about no?

Forums are extremely unfriendly and need a complete redesign if they hope people will use them

…and Facebook Groups.

A lot of people simply don’t realize that a lot of traditional community, especially more niche are moving to Facebook. There’s no even Reddit alternative for them.

From fried chicken cooking, big tree photography, McDonalds toys collector, to local history archiver.

It’s harder to convince them here, unless there are Facebook Group alternative for fediverse.

Kagi could be a good alternative to Google Translate: https://translate.kagi.com/translate/https://www.xataka.com/servicios/foros-internet-estan-desapareciendo-porque-ahora-todo-reddit-discord-eso-preocupante

I proudly still use a super specialised old school online forum and it works great for those purposes.

I hope someone is archiving that data. Lots of great small communities with great info/help.

it’s worrying because all that knowledge will be lost instead of living somewhere in a forum indexed by a search engine.

But in the same time, I see more people fleeing from traditional search engines to AI … I don’t know where we’re heading at

Don’t forget random Telegram groups!

most of them, but alot of them for niche subjects are still there. theres one i go to where people were banned from reddit (tons of accounts used for linking, OF and advert) basiclaly they are reporting thier experiences the same way here as right there. medical forums is still alive though, as are "joining the military"ones.

What can we do? What can we do about Meta and Xitter? Just try to show people that there’s another side where the grass actually is greener and invite them to join.

Discord, Reddit and Lemmy are bad choices for forums. If you want ANY useful information to stick, put it on forums you know are gonna get indexed and archived reliably. Reddit is indexable but there’s no guarantee the page will still be there when you search for it through Google.

Discord is completely unindexable so any information that exists on a server that gets deleted is lost forever.

Lemmy is a half-way house. As far as I know it’s kinda indexable but not really.