Old school forums were pretty great. I’ve recently been much more heavily on the official Age of Empires forums since getting away from Reddit, where most of the discussion happens. Those forums are nowhere near as active as the various Aoe subreddits, but still a pretty lively place for some good meaningful discussions, which is nice. Definitely not as good as back when any subject would have fan- (as opposed to company-)run forums to choose from, but not too bad.

But yeah I’m with you on the broadcasty nature of Twitter & hence Mastodon. I use Mastodon occasionally, but find it rather awkward to interact with compared to the topic-based communities on Lemmy.