i started using the internet in the late 2000’s and still remember when you search for something most of the times it would return with a forum post … now its just random websites … if you ever need real and concise answer you have to add site:reddit.com at every search and since discord or twitter are not crawlable by these search crawlers they are not mentioned . Where did all those forums went…are there still active forums ?
Aren’t we like, on a forum right now?
Also, yes, the more traditional style of forums are still around too.
I would even argue that Lemmy is more of a return to traditional forums from reddit due to the independent nature of each instance.
I wouldn’t say its a return of traditional forums. Far from it really design wise. I think its more of a return to independence and decentralization. I think we’re done with the whole “Web 2.0. Everything in one convenient place” and want to back to an era where things were much harder to find and communities were a lot more separated and dedicated to their own spaces. The fediverse isn’t the end all be all and we’re gonna suddenly go back to the 90s but to me, it’s an honest step in the right direction that could really change the internet for the better.
Not done with it. We want both decentralization and everything in a convenient place. Best of both worlds. So we end up with a discussion board that is also an rss reader, aka the activitypub protocol.
I’m hoping your right, that it changes the web for the better. But most people follow advertisements right back into the clutches of corpo-controlled products.
Yeah. Lemmy and Reddit are basically mega-forums. The voting and threading systems went a huge way toward solving the problems that made traditional forums unworkable at large scale. e.g. there were always 8 pages of replies to trudge through to find one relevant answer. (XDA is a great modern example of this problem. Woe to those who find an XDA thread while troubleshooting.)
It was also so, so much easier for someone to make a subreddit than host and maintain their own phpBB server. I am speaking from experience on both ends, there.
Reddit killed the traditional forum, and you know what? Good. It was time.
The same problem makes large Discord painful to use.
the more traditional style of forums are still around too.
They’re very rare these days though. It’s a whole lot easier to keep all your interests in one place rather than heading off to one forum for gaming chat and another for programming chat and another for gardening chat.
Keeping it all in a single feed means your interest can be piqued at random times and you’ll be more likely to interact.
