Lemmy vs og intenet forums

There has definitely been a renaissance of old school forums since social media started to decline. One advantage to them ia that to bother registering and tracking a separate website for one topic, you'd have to be pretty interested in that topic. So the tiny barrier to entry seems like it promotes deeper discussion and higher quality responses.

Simultaneously, some really cool new forum software has become available with useful and elegant features that the old forums didn't have, but without the attention traps and monetization of the corporate web.

If you have a hobby, look for a forum; you might be surprised at how may have sprung up.

TL;DR: Lemmy and Reddit aren't the "true successors" of the old school forums, but their advantages over forums are considerably bigger than their disadvantages.

Lemmy and Reddit-like systems have a lower barrier of entry and higher discoverability, but forums are more organised.

Pretend for a moment that you had to individually search and sign up for every Lemmy community that you've posted. (If you're a new lemming, sub it with subreddits.) Would've you posted in all of them? Probably not - you'd simply post in a few of them, and forget about the others. That's what killed most old school forums.

And, sure, you might create a big forum about "everything", and then fill it with subforums and sub-subforums about specific themes... except that it'll become an unmanageable mess "behind the curtains", as often moderating a subforum about a certain theme requires some knowledge on it. Lemmy and Reddit don't hit this issue because moderators are mostly independent from the admins.

On the other hand, a good forum will usually encompass all aspects of a certain topic, and it'll be neatly divided into subforums based on focus. Like, a cooking forum split into subforums for recipes, techniques, food safety, etc. In the meantime, a cooking Lemmy community will likely have all of that dumped together, and you'll need to filter out what you don't care about.

It would be possible to implement subforums in a Lemmy-like platform, but that's low pressure. If a subtopic becomes too common in a comm, people create a second comm to talk about it.

I'm not including Kbin into this discussion because it seems to me more like a "bridge" system for Mastodon (microblogging) and Lemmy. Nor Discord - Discord is basically a chat platform, that some people use for forum-like discussion.

Not without signatures, specifically the banner artwork with your user name superimposed over a scene from your favorite anime or video game.

Not discord, because it's not indexable by web crawlers

I still use the underwater ethnic basketweaving forums known as 4chan.