Internet forums are disappearing because now it's all Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.

I wish there were alternatives to Reddit. If anyone has a recommendation, let me know.

Reddit does shitty stuff, but at least I'm able to find stuff on there. Why Discord took off as a medium to replace forums is beyond me. It's not easily searchable, and search engines can't index it. If people aren't fastidious about replying to messages they're responding to, it's just a nonsense stream of consciousness from dozens of people.

That being said, I hate the formatting of most forums. Reddit and Lemmy's comment nesting is excellent. It's very easy to follow conversations.

I’m gonna keep posting on Lemmy and hope that helps. Our collective communities should not be in the hands of mega corporations.

I tried running a forum.... With 24 hours I had 10k posts for Russian porn... And I followed best practices to set it up.

There was a story recently about a depressing number of web domains disappearing. Everybody just gravitates to the big corporate sites now, and it makes the internet ecosystem boring and less diverse.

It's the equivalent of Walmarts running every mom & pop store out of town.

Welcome to the new era of enshittification where you'll eventually have to subscribe to access or make posts, and none of it will be searchable on any search engines.

I'm particularly concerned about companies who have effectively outsourced their tech support to Social Media.

I am a Google Fi subscriber, and their customer support is so abysmal that a Google employee started up a "Reddit Request" system for Redditors to use to escalate support requests.

When I quit Reddit in a huff over the APIcalypse, the main thing that led me to not delete my account was the notion that if I ever had issues with Fi, and didn't have an active Reddit account with sufficient karma to be believed, my issue may never get enough attention to be fixed.

My favorite forum is still chugging along!

https://forums.mst3k.com/

If you're a fan, you're most welcome.

If you're not a fan, you're still welcome, but you probably won't get a lot of our references.

If you're a dickweed- well, you probably won't last any longer than Tom Servo did as an Observer.

I wouldn't mind Reddit if it weren't for the opaque and hidden moderation. Tree nested communication is much more superior than traditional thread based communication. We need that in truly federated fashion, and lemmy was just a step there whose questionable leadership hampers any real wide-scale adoption.

Lemmy does slightly better, but essentially proves that when you have shitty administrators and moderators, the only thing that's going to be transparent is the quickest and easiest excuse, and when it's a lie it remains it remains incontestable. You only need to look at threads titled "Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem" and read the comments to get a sense of the scale of the problem. Discord, at least it's much more obvious that you are joining closed off communities and that discussions are essentially time limited.

Things like community wikis have also dropped off in use specially recently because it's becoming clear how much of their content is intent on milking their users. First it was ads, and it was excused because "hosting costs" (regardless of how comparable they were), now it's AI scavenging your content and those services actively preventing you from eliminating content you contributed but are no longer willing to let them host.

Even in Lemmy, where's the option for me to remove my comments when I no longer want them to be hosted? In Lemmy, due to its federated nature, it's even more difficult, but given that you can edit comments and have those updates propagated, not impossible. But nothing beats reddit in abuse, where they shamelessly tried to say they would allow respect and allow users to monetize their content but instead proceeded to do the complete opposite. The fact that there might/will be some other cache on the Internet that stores the content does not excuse it and give people the right to pressure and dismiss chain of ownership of those contributions.

Add to this that the economy is far worse and that the tech boom is shrinking and much more competition driven along with a general decline in society for respectful contributions and discourse, and you get a lot less of the sort of charity that was involved in older communities.

I advocate for two things, oddly things I never would have in earlier internet:

Paid forums. A one time payment for registration.
Strict rules and quick bans. But allow offenders to buy back in. Permaban for serious offenses. .

Why? Because if it costs you $10 or 15 to re-activate after screwing around, you're much more likely to read the room and not fuck around too much with others. It encourages users to point out bad behavior, and mods to act decisively. If the mods or management totally suck, then it can go sour, but that's true of any community.

In this case though it can at least partially help to offset costs from shitty users, and keep bots at bay by making them cost a registration fee.

I don't love it as a "solution", but when Facebook was small, people behaved better. But now people post the most unhinged shit ever under their full legal name, so no amount of daylight is going to put the proverbial trolls back in their cages. Just gotta lock them out of civil spaces.

You wanna talk about Honda engine tuning here with us? Don't be a fucking asshole, or get banned.

You wanna chat with fans of 50s cinema and the rise of modern camera film technique? Do it without brining up woke/trump/biden/Covid or get out.

I like that we have free stuff like lemmy and reddit for now, but bots are getting far, far worse.

Maybe for the generic cat/dog image sharing boards but niche topics like machining are still thriving.

why not implement forums with reddit-like threads?

I like the idea of Reddit and it works much better than Lemmy. But the moderation and AI scraping make it a no-go site for me anymore which is a shame.

I love internet forums and have been a mod at some and very high poster at other. But the snowball effect gets them. If there's no traffic, there's no posts, so there's no traffic. You need to have a good community to make it work. One area reddit really shines, small communities exist on a huge platform. Great idea before the enshittification.

I hate discord and the fact that anyone replaces customer support or fan support pages with it, is just fundamentally broken. The idea of a forum is that the question is asked and archived. 20 years later someone else googles the question and sees the answer and all the replies that lead up to it. That's what forums are for. In discord you ask a question and 30 seconds later it's gone forever eaten by useless drivel. Never to be searched or found again. Idiotic.

You missed when the web KILLED BBSs!!!!

That was the end! We're already dead!!!

Forums are alive and well for BBQ. See Amazing Ribs forums and BBQ Brethren.

if you have a thread you like, make sure to archive.is or archive.org it

Make it too big to fail
Wait for the fall while enshittifying
Cash in on the bail out
Go to 2

Hey guys not to be a downer but like…what DO we do when a federated instance goes down and takes all its content with it?

Maybe I'm too young or just had bad luck, but ALL the interactions I've ever had with Internet forums have been unbelievably awful. Whenever I asked a question, I was asked why I wanted to know that and was lectured that my reasons were stupid, bad, or wrong (how is that even possible?). People hijacked my post and talked about anything else, and I received NO answer whatsoever! This kind of thing happened way too often, regardless of the type of forum. This occurred in Skyrim forums, Coh2 forums, PC forums, aquarium forums, ... I hate forums. It's good that they are dying, and I, for one, will not miss them at all.

I would had concern over internet forums disappearing back in 2015-2012, but now a days, I don't worry as much. if it wasn't being replaced by the fediverse. Well maybe not replaced, but it is an alternative that has some good activity surprisingly and still growing, thanks to Mastodons marketing. It's like an upgraded forums. And everyone can communicate no matter where they go on the Fediverse.

Just to pose a thought; how practical would it be for a small subject owner to run a FediVerse instance intended to stay localized to their domain?

For example: Indie game owner makes a reasonably popular game, they set up a website that Lemmy users can subscribe/join directly, and use that for forums/tips/discussions related to their game. People don't need to register as long as they have an account somewhere. Some number of users would be new to Lemmy and use that site's registration for later discovery. And, someday when X instance (the game, or the next popular one) gets infested by neonazis, everyone just moves to another and/or has other discussions backed up.

I don't know how practical or convenient that is though. I imagine a lot of groups don't want to risk lost users.

We need help communities on Lemmy. That's what is going to make it rank in SEO and fly. Communities like software help (office, adobe creative products, etc), financial help and advice. And ask docs communities.

Memes won't help SEO rank.

Honestly who uses discord nowadays? its completely unbearable

I wouldn't blame those 2. Forums have been dying since Myspace and Facebook. The specialized ones like the machinist and woodworking ones I belong to are going strong. So are the firearm related ones.

Internet Forums disappearing is a real shame.

For my hobby there's still lots and lots of old and relevant archived forum threads that regularly help me out.

But for new information, that has all moved to Facebook Groups. This forces me to keep a Facebook account, which I hate and would otherwise ditch in a heartbeat.

Forums are alive and well when looking for car info. Whenever I get a different car I look for communities with the most activity and that is usually a forum.

The one exception I can think of (proving the post to be true) is the first generation Tundra (2000-2007). The FB group had more current news than the forums and I managed to get banned (first time ever).

if anyone here used to go on kongregate a lot, go check it out now. it is depressing. they dont even have chat rooms anymore

At least the Fediverse exists.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

And both of those things SUUUUUCK.

Lemmy!

The Something Awful Forums still exist, and I go there a lot more than I go here or Reddit these days.

Mods all over the Internet killed forums with their bullshit. The users too. You can't tame the mob and the users drag their shit on the carpet like a dog doing the scuttle.

Take a look at the shit show of the Neogaf/Resetera split as an example.

you spelled 'non-federating internet forums' wrong

Only thing on Reddit is AI bots.

There was a while where as a fighting game player the best way to learn obscure tech or situational high damage combos was to sift through discords looking for info and it was BALLS. Lately I feel like everyone more committed to the fan wikis and maybe twitter for that stuff but oh man.

Yeah everyone like "AI content flood oh noooo, AI AI AI" yet very few mention this much much bigger issue of centralized algorithmically controlled walled gardens where everyone is. That's kinda like WeChat in China. It is hard to have real democracy or freedom of information (or privacy of any sort) when only a few big corporations have the social networks all locked down. The bad thing is because of the social network effect it's extremely hard to get people to switch even if the alternatives are even better! So much momentum. We need to find out a way to be able to help distribute users because the software isn't the problem anymore and neither is infrastructure or any of the other stuff that is given the big guys advantage really. The biggest problem aside from the social network effect is monetization I suppose. Still, it's hard to even start any kind of method of monetization for alternative platforms or decentralized platforms when you can't get anybody to switch in the first place or can't get critical mass.

No it isn’t. Forums are cesspools.

Every now and then I get a forum as a search result and they're just so clunky. Replies are spaced out too much, no chains, everyone has a long winded signature phrase. I'm glad it went to this kind of format.

Don't worry, the US government is hard at work banning social media. Wouldn't want people to expressing ideas.

I feel like we need a better model. Reddits/Lemmys algorithm makes long conversations impossible and forums make long conversations dominate and this causes a lot of additional disruption. There has to be a design that meets a middle ground that can take over which better represents both the ephemeral nature of news and article discussion while also supporting a number of long standing more detailed discussions which expel low effort content.

It‘s really annoying how searching anything online becomes harder by the day because of it and AI is not helping with it either.

I think a big stumbling block is authentication. I think Web 3 could really revive indie forums if the was integrated properly.

It was give people a single sign on for thousands of forums.

smiles in lemmy

I run an internet forum for a very specific topic. I have to manually register people, because before I did that, spammers would come in and crap all over everything. (Fortunately it's not a very popular topic, so I only have to register new accounts a few times each month.) I run the forum on my own dime, no advertising or anything, as a side hobby.

There's also a very active Facebook group. The Facebook group is great for general conversation, but often when a technical question comes up, please just link to the forum where the info is stored. Searching in Facebook is terrible, and what happens if Facebook decides to block access to history for some reason? (Not that they necessarily would, but I've seen it happen many times. Remember when Photobucket blocked access to old pictures unless you had a paid account? We lost a bunch of useful pictures on the forum when that happened.)

They are not disappearing, I still use forums like discogs, XDA, satellite forums, local forums country or city etc. You just have to search and find.

You have to go to some pretty toxic plaices if you really want to experience old internet.

Neons.org

Discourse is a great server, i see a lot of places with their own forum now, which is good.

I remember when I used to be able to find dedicated message boards for bands that I liked. Now I'm lucky if there's a subreddit where it's just a bunch of people submitting poorly drawn fan art of the band.

Especially since Reddit passes out bans like candy, it's the biggest forum on the internet and I can't use it because of a site wide ban that I didn't deserve.

linux trolling

All my heart still belongs to the canon HV20 forum. It taught me how to film, it taught me how to chat to people in an online community.

It was never about a camcorder. It was about connection.

Plus, you could search for stuff on google and the forum results would pop up. Good look with discord doing that.