I like this better.

The threaded conversations allow a useful interesting discussion to continue, even after some random person's comment details half the participants.

Like others I also appreciate threaded comments here.

But for many niches - forums still abound. I regularly participate in four for specific interests.

On the flip side I loathe the attempt to replace forums not with Lemmy/reddit-like tools but with Discord.

Ugh.

Upvote/Downvote/likes is the cancer that ruined it all. Before that one actually had to speak in support or against any given ideas. Now people can assume anything is true/false based on an arbitrary engagement number.

Everyone here saying they still exist.

That’s not the point.

The variety and quantity have all been replaced by spaces like Facebook, Youtube, Discord, and Reddit. Heck, I used to help run two gaming phpBB forums and participate in several others. They’re all gone or the groups have moved to Discord or whatever. PhpBB forums were usually run by private individuals, modded by those with shared interest, and subsisted on donations to run if the owner didn’t just pay for it out of pocket. It was still a little bit of the “old internet” where anyone could create their own slice of it for next to nothing.

I miss them because is was a concentration of each niche and there usually wasn’t much competition. No competition for “likes” or whatever. More of a conversation. If you were into something like old tractor restoration (this one still exists as a forum), you could find a wealth of knowledge in text and photo form, videos, if any, are short and generally to the point without deliberate monetization. I absolutely cannot stand YT as a “information” source because of the constant fluff generation to extend the video for adspace and groveling for subscribers. But that’s a whole different rant.

Anyway, yeah…some forums do still exist. Thankfully they’re generally pretty good at what they do. The others have vanished or moved to corporate social media platforms.

I prefer and always have preferred a vote system like we have here. Forums made paralel conversations impossible to follow, gave a bigger voice to trolls and made finding information in big threads difficult. I absolutely hated the common answer to a question being "search the forum". I already have Jared, the search function is trash and the information is scattered and outdated.

What aspect I do miss is the fact that threads stayed relevant for more than 24hrs. I think a combination of the two systems would work for a forum 2.0, where ranking is based on activity and votes, so a post gets pushed back up in ranking if it's still active and relevant, instead of just taking raw votes and age in considerarion, but also the comments within are grouped in conversations based on who replied to who and can move up and down based on activity and age.

Forums were cool. They often had their own culture and in-jokes. People would become well-known on the forum. There's a couple names I recognize on here, but it's mostly transient. (On the other hand, I've probably had a vicious argument with someone and then a nice chat with them later, without realizing it was the same person).

Most internet users seem bland, and just congeal onto youtube, discord, twitch, and other nightmares.

Unrelated but does anyone know how to fix my gpu drivers?

Never responds again

I miss forum signatures. The best you can usually get these days is a tiny little piece of flair. It would be fun if Lemmy or something supported forum signatures, though I suppose the moderation for that could be annoying.

I just really liked that level of expression.

I used to mod for a forum. I would not do that again.

Also, isn't this interface just forum+?

Yes, for one particular reason: I've always favored longer, slower posting - structured responses to earlier posts with multiple paragraphs to propose a point, explain, and support it. Including the ability to quote / link back to multiple different posts in a thread if needed. The... for lack of a better way to put it, "Reddit-esque" style of branched comments to a post (which includes Lemmy) is nice because it allows multiple parallel discussions rather than one dominating one, but it also seems to discourage longer, more in-depth responses. It also means that interesting ongoing discussions which I'd love to get into can get buried down later in the comments.

Like OP, I recognize that there's nothing actually stopping me from doing this on Lemmy. There's chat and sort-by-new, and of course I can link as many other comments as I want. But the overwhelming trend is towards shorter, snappier answers before you move on to the next comment chain or post; discussions rarely last more than a few hours, whereas forum threads used to be able to keep them going for days.

I always hated the UX of forums. It was incredibly difficult to follow long threads with loads of pages. Personally I prefer the format we have here on Lemmy where comments are nested off the main post.

The absolute pain of opening an old forum thread with an exact solution/guide and all of the images are long gone.

Of course asking for the same solution on reddit will get you a 300 long chain of useless comments.

I miss the individuality of the old internet. Websites, communities, and users being themselves.

ShitNugget9000 on one forum might be SirReginald79 on another.

Policies set for the community, not the leaseholder.

The internet controlled by a hegemony sucks.

That forum structure worked for nice forums with like a hundred active users, it doesn't work when it's tens of thousands of people. I mean I miss old time BBS forums, for what it's worth, but the "reddit style" system is much better in my opinion.

I miss the annonimity of them, and the lack of robots crawling them

I miss the community. I was a member of a community forum for about 18 years. You knew everyone and it was generally nice.

I feel like forums sucked too because of the lack of sorting.

They just don't scale well to many users. Once you hit a certain number of users, without some method to sort, its just information overload.

Hell, forum threads that are too long inevitably go completely off the rails and become off topic troves.

I think there has to be a better intermediate format, like perhaps a mix of systems, but I think the main thing that makes reddit-likes suck, is their systems of governance.

Something I realized very quickly with lemmy for instance, is that its the not at all benevolent dictator positions that are the big problem. The main incentives for people choosing to spend their time in mod positions still remains to impose their will, whether that be their opinion or power over others speech.

There is something at its core which is wrong with this system at scale. It allows for mods to collect up critical masses of people before then knowing that due to that critical mass they have captive audiences where there is high friction to leave or start something else.

Lemmy has a very bandaid "solution" for this in that there can be multiple of any given community/subreddit, but they all suffer from the fact that whatever a moderator wants is what happens, and even in the worst case scenarios, that is just moved up one layer to admins, who are incentived to appear as hands off as possible on moderators, lest they get turned on by the people who "help" them.

Reddit sucks because of a lot of other profit driven reasons, but I think this is the main structural problem and lemmy shares in this.

Forums have this problem too by the way, but its just that forums are so separate and so bad at handling massive amounts of casual users, that they run into this far less.

I definitely miss being able to search the internet for helpful forum posts. The fact that most things are on discord now and not internet searchable is extremely annoying and only going to get worse.

No. I feel like reddit/lemmy is a good progression for forums, and I absolutely hate discord when used for technical stuff

I still use some forums like xda-developers and I don't enjoy it as much a I did 10-15 years ago

Get on some Linux forums.

I absolutely do. I've often dreamed of setting up a forum for my immediate friend group but I don't think the idea would get a lot of traction.

I also notice that I don't pay attention to usernames on Lemmy

I'm not sure if this is a Lemmy-wide thing or if it's just because I use the Connect app, but I can add User Notes that function as a little tag next to people's usernames. Since I started doing that I've noticed just how small Lemmy is, or at least how few people actually are posting content.

Most of my notes are just to let me know not to bother getting into arguments with them on stuff. Conservative trolls, tankies, AI slop enthusiasts,, people who steal content from others, etc. But occasionally I'll mark someone down as a notable quality poster.

You guys are missing out on my badass image signatures.

They still exist, they're just kind of rare. There's even federated forums like NodeBB. I actively read stuff on SpaceBattles, Sufficient Velocity, etc. It's admittedly difficult to find something with absolutely no like/karma system, but for instance the hellhole known as GameFAQs still exists.

Do we have a list of not death forums in 2025, I have been eyeing the following (Spanish forums) and even logged in again!

Emudesc.com Elotrolado.net Forosdz.club

As I only frequented forums as a kid and I didn't know the English language back then, Spanish forums is the only sweet memory that I have, but now I can be part of English forums too, the sad part is they are no longer mainstream 😅

I still use them, because they're awesome.
They're not gone, although there are quite a bit fewer than some time ago.

Personally I think that this Reddit style is an upgrade design wise. And as far as recognising people goes, I'm using an app that lets you tag users (Summit) and this has gone quite a long way. It's also made the start paying attention to other usernames to an extent, so if I notice that someone often posts content that vibes with me or whatever, I can give them a ⭐ or something.

What I do miss from the days when forums were dominant is that people stayed in their lanes a little more. A particular forum or board or even thread is for a particular topic, and people who derailed or came along just to insult and shit on everything were dealt with, without this crying about 'free speech'.

Current day social media has spawned a bunch of people who feel entitled to say whatever they want to whoever they want in any space they want, and cry about blue haired SJWs or something if there's consequences. And they act like the internet used to be this place where forum moderators didn't rule with an iron fist, or like the 'real world' is somewhere that you can behave this way without being punched in the face.

I just think a lot of problems could be solved if jocks went back to discussing sportsball and cars and stayed in their lanes, instead of considering themselves to be experts on biology and sociology and vaccines. There's a fine line between 'free speech' and letting the inmates run the asylum, and the last 10 years have proven that.

Basically what I miss from the forum days is that back then, the conspiracy theorist idiots would've probably been banned, and would've stayed in the fringes of society instead of going mainstream.

I like forums, but maybe I'm part of the problem. I've read a forum obsessively for years without registering an account. Even when I have an account, I rarely post/comment. I've been reading Lemmy almost daily for over a year before registering an account and don't reply much even with an account. Decentralization starts with individuals, so I'm going to try to add signal to the fediverse.

I generally prefer the traditional flat forum UI with oldest first, but that's mostly a client issue. The problem though is if others are using a different UI the conversation may flow differently (think threaded vs flat forums).

RE karma, a lot of forums show post counts and like counts next to their forum profile, which is often included in every reply, so in some ways, the likes (karma) was a little more in your face. I think there was less astro turfing due to scope of benefit. What I mean is that while traditional forums were decentralized, so was the account and its reputation, so karma (like/post count) farming was isolated to that specific forum/community and if you were astro turfing, you'd get banned and lose that and could not transsfer that to other forums. Services like reddit effectively make this transferrable between forums. I'm concerned about how this will play out as decentralized platforms grow. It could be worse than reddit. I've been trying to come up with ways to handle this, but I can find flaws in every idea I've had so far.

Depending on the topics, Whirlpool is still pretty active: https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/