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Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.
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this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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I proudly still use a super specialised old school online forum and it works great for those purposes.
during the first big migration to lemmy a lot of folks were splitting between discord and here, and a really common refrain was "anything but old school forums" and i absolutely did not and do not get this attitude. old school forums were great! the discussions were always super relevant because everyone was there to discuss whatever specific thing everyone had signed up for, and the people posting were always super reliable, knowledge wise, because, again, it was a dedicated place for discussing something specific, and the frequently asked questions would always end up in a really good wiki. sometimes i wonder if people had bad experiences on those forums because they're much more focused. like on reddit everyone would complain about the arch forums on r/arch, but none of what they said matched the actual tone of the arch forums. it made me think they posted short one liner questions as thread starters instead of giving a full breakdown of the error they were seeing, what they did to troubleshoot the problem, and what errors had come about during that process.
overall, i think we've had a shift in the architecture of the internet thanks to general purpose discussion sites like twitter and reddit. before, the internet was cathedrals filled with texts related to their specific topic. everything on a sportster related forum was going to be about the maintenance and modification of sportsters. maybe there was a subsection where people could talk about their other motorcycles, but that was more of a social lounge than anything, like the equivalent of the fellowship hall in my cathedral analogy.
after reddit and twitter took over those scenes, the internet became a mall. unfocused, impersonal, and only meant to pipeline you into purchasing products. none of the people up front are very knowledgeable because you don't need to be knowledgeable to make sales, you need to be attention getting. especially when what's for sale is disposable
At risk of rambling... It feels like attention spans have shortened, too.
https://www.axios.com/2024/11/29/gen-z-kids-reading-tv-songs
People don't want to dig through long discussions and documentation, they want a quick fix in a YouTube Short, or for it to be fed to them shooting the breeze in Discord.
And this sorta works short term, until the "old" information well those shorter systems rely on dries up.
It's already a serious problem in newer topics. I'm part of the "localllama" community, for instance, and it feels like any central organization of knowledge has completely collapsed, and there is no old info to fall back on because everything is so new.
We have to fight back since the commercialization of the Internet by refusing to use corporate systems. Old school forms are great although I will say the friction of having to sign up for a new account just to post is a pretty big deterrent, being able to just subscribe to a new subreddit makes it easier to explore very wide range of topics all at once, and to have all the newest post brought to you in one place you can check on your work break.
Maybe a hack with RSS or something could have worked but we all use those platforms for a reason, back when they were objectively much better
It seems so innocent at the time we didn't know it was going to get this bad. At least there's broad consensus nothing's going to fundamentally change. We're already taking first step. I'd like to see old school style forums, and also a focus on atemporality. Being able to have conversations with people over different time zones or even different months is extremely useful and something basically you need no internet conversations that we should really lean into the ability to do that. We need to get rid of the culture of shaming people for responding to old posts
and maybe bring back some of the old personal touches like forms signatures but with Federation so you can just make one account and do everything through it if you so choose. Reddit was kind of sort of system that worked like this and let me is now but the feature set was Bare Bones in comparison. We can do better we just need to develop the software
The one thing I don't like about oldschool forums is that I have to make an account for each one. With each account comes a new place where your email address is registered, and a new password, with each password comes a new avenue for attack if you're shitty about web security and use the same password (or a variation thereof) for everything. If you use a password manager you're fine, but I don't want my email being put everywhere.
There needs to be some kind of SSO that's open source (like Google but not Google), so I can log into any forum that implements it, but with that comes the cost of running an identity provider and I don't think forums are going to want to pay for that in addition to their own costs. Maybe some sort of distributed system or something where each forum donates a little bit of compute power to running the IDP, I dunno...
Mozilla's Persona protocol/service could have been this, but it failed to get traction and they abandoned it. Maybe it was an idea that was just too early. Decentralized auth is a really hard problem.
My problem with forums is that they spiral out of control. Forum lovers see this as a huge plus but I'm not reading 1700 pages (not posts) of bullshit across three posts just to get to the current info.
Any time I see
At the bottom of a post I just click off the website and go somewhere else.
You don't have to read everything posted over the entire history of the forum. Old threads are kept so that when you need information they contain, you can find them with search, not with the expectation that new people are going to read all of them before posting.
i do, especially with a forum i am on after i was banned from reddit, its was discussing how people were recently banne dand how to evade it.