TLDR, yes and the current popularity of Reddit may be because it is actually hiding how it is not really that much of a community of people but rather a bad simulation.

My PhD was in this area of how older-style internet forums operate and touched on why they continue to hang around. Yes they absolutely (with caveats lol) have a future, but the mass appeal of the reddit style is surprising. I didn't delve into that in my work but do have an educated guess that could be explored further (hint by someone else) to explain that.

Forums require a lot of engagement and memory on the part of the people who use them. Think about how context is needed to understand any text - like how easy it is to misunderstand just what the hell the USA founders really meant in the Constitution because their world-view is mostly gone. Pick any other old document if that's a little too contentious for you.

Well, forums are the same. They require a community of people who interact with one another so that meaning can be created and maintained. Like you said, you have to read and read and read and then comment and get picked on for getting some minor lingo wrong or for breaking some taboo. Eventually, if you stick to it, you'll become a part of the "machine". Quite literally, you will be hosting the knowledge and processes that make the forum work, just in your head and not on the server. There are some decent higher-level theories that can help give a conceptual framework for this sort of thing. Post-materialism is helpful, so is technological posthumanism. A shortcut to all this is to think of the transhumanist movement in the 1990s. They thought they would upload their consciousness to the net. Well, in a twist of fate, the net has been downloaded into our minds instead. Basically, all those apps and stuff don't make sense unless you have some cultural wetware installed in your noggin and some ability to communicate with others in order to keep it constantly updated.

That's a lot of work and most people don't do it. Instead, they'll grab the simple and readily-accessible stuff. Memes, catch-phrases, "in-jokes" that aren't really "in" anymore. Basically, most of Reddit can be considered a simulacrum - a piss-poor representation of community that requires little effort to participate within. Notably though, at the same time Reddit is full of the kinds of complex and effort-laden communities that I mentioned before. It is just that they are hidden in plain sight. Anyway, gotta go, it's bedtime.

I just really don't want to go back to not having threaded comment trees. It's the big reason I left them for Reddit in the first place! But the small forum feel, the sense of community, the primitive/lack of algorithms? Yeah hit me with that shit. I could see a Fediverse platform that does this being workable.

This seems like a great place to mention that there is a message board front-end for Lemmy that can make it look like an old phpBB forum:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB

https://fedibb.ml/

I have absolutely no ability to read a several-hundred page thread anymore. I think the dig/etc innovation that killed them was vote-weighting posts and comments rather than chronologically ordering them. It gives you an ordered list of things that are worth your attention. Folks inclined to read deeper than that can get a bit of a rush from finding some hidden gems and helping them rise to the top, either with new posts linking to a comment or otherwise.

I think the new way is much better.

I'm an old-timer who got on the internet in the mid '80s, so I spent a lot of time on usenet. I often miss those days. Usenet was anarchic, but it wasn't subject to the vicissitudes of capitalism. It couldn't be controlled. It was designed to survive nuclear war. We need something like that again.

I loved them, I miss them dearly, but no, I don't think they'll come back.

A lot has changed and the internet is not the same, for better and for worse. For one, it's just a lot bigger. You'd think that'd make it easier, but it seems to make it harder. There's too much noise for the communities to stand out, so what usually happens is one or two get huge and the others dwindle and die. Even just look at Lemmy, through no fault of your own, Beehaw is becoming one of the largest instances and it requires active work to spread the weight across the rest of the federation. People gravitate I guess.

Plus, because it's so much bigger, there's less of an identity in the spaces that do survive. Post in any reddit thread, then go to another. Chances are nobody'll be the same (except for a few superusers) so there's no real sense of belonging or community that the old forums had. Back then you trolled your friends, not strangers.

I think there will always be people who feel out of place in the neat boxes the Internet is packed into. Not everyone is comforted by fancy CSS and an ever-lurking algorithm. Plus, it’s hard to genuinely connect with people on modern platforms… That’s my two cents.

Whenever I look at forums these days it’s because I need to ask a very specific question that Reddit doesn’t have a big community for, for example I’m getting into building valve amps (tube amps across the Atlantic) and I’ve spent much more time lurking on the DiyAudio forum than Reddit for that purpose.

I think forums have the problem of search engines actually being spam delivery engines these days and also a lack of interoperability including a need to have fifty million different logins, all which have to be different since the probability of at least one getting compromised is basically 1 given enough browsing. I think the Fediverse certainly will help those two issues.

This post inspired me to log back into my MacRumors forum account and start checking things out again. I've been a member there since 2007 with >6,000 posts.

I hope so. I miss the old days of forums and stuff. the Pre/peri web 2.0 era was when I first started exploring the web and while i probably have rose-tinted glasses, I feel there was far more community in those days, when you knew who was in the audience when you posted something.

I really hope so. I really miss that feel of the old internet. It's nice to have an online community where you get to know other users just from seeing their posts regularly. And obviously, I'm all for decentralization at this point after seeing how bad consolidation and centralization of websites has messed up the internet at this point. I still use one forum regularly that's very active and two others less often that are smaller but have enough active users.

Obviously, if reddit dies, I could see them making at least a small comeback. But I'm not sure how sustainable they are. It would require several different website owners to make their own websites with different topics of focus. Enough people would have to be able to find the websites in the first place for them to be successful. Like most of the internet, Google as a search engine seems to have gotten worse over the past 5-7 years and it's harder to find websites, especially smaller, newer websites like a brand new forum. If it's hard to find, you're going to be struggling with the network effect for a long time which will cripple growth even further.

Additionally, without the automatic sorting that reddit and lemmy has, the format of static pages of replies also feels a bit dated now. It's harder to discover useful/helpful/quality posts without reading through pages of replies. Plus, I don't know how much money small website owners can realistically make off just putting ads on their website nowadays.

But I'm rooting for them. I really am.

Absolutely. They’re great for when you don’t need to federate and just need a place to chat and share with a given community or set of friends.

I hope more come back. I’ve recently joined https://ukretro.online/forum/ and while it’s slow going I hope it gathers up a little community there.

Forums can be great, fairly easy to manage, spaces for people to gather in a way that they control and own. Even out here in fedi we don’t (most of us) control or own the servers we’re using and running mastodon etc.. isn’t especially cheap. PHPbb needs chuff all server to run so it very very affordable to run as a personal thing.

Usenet! What is dead may never die.

few communities exist online in only one place anymore (for example, lemmy itself has a Matrix space, a #hashtag, etc). i think forums, IM, and the different kinds of (micro-)blogging coexist to encourage participants to balance length and substance/effort to different degrees in their discussions. IM favors short, distilled ideas; blogs favor lengthy in-depth things but don’t tend to encourage as much direct participation, and forums fill a middle ground.

but forums are also a victim of their own success: a highly active thread means you have to read for an hour before participating, or else you contribute something that’s already been said and you just add to the unwieldiness! tree-style comments really do let people selectively explore different, narrow slices of a topic without creating that mess. it’s not perfect, but if i’m forced to choose one or the other, it’s usually an easy call to make.

on the other hand, you could argue that some portion of “threads” in a chat app (particularly ones that live for more than a day) are really just watered down forums. so maybe we’re destined to recreate these things without realizing it, just in ways that borrow from all these different modes of communication in less rigid ways.

They never went away for pirate/jailbreak communities. But, lot of hobbyists ones seem to have gone away, so reason pirate ones remain could be due to the nature of the scene.

Similar question asked on ycombinator. what ever happened to Usenet? Oh it's still alive??

Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

I've never actually used many old style forums (except for Pine64's) since I'm a bit younger, and my parents were strict on using the internet when I was younger. I like the idea of less content centralization since everything seems to happen on the larger websites, but I have no idea where to find almost any of these places lol

There certainly seem to be topics I track where forum activity outpaces Reddit. Haven't explored Discord for the purpose. I would like to see communities emerge or move to something on the activitypub - lemmy devs made a forum frontend (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB). The potential seems to be there to provide a forum interface/experience that federates.

DSLReports is still pretty active for the wired ISPs

I have fond memories of belonging to Harry Potter forums in my teens, writing forums in my early twenties, and other random homemade forums with barely half a dozen users. I do miss the sense of community, the little dramas, the signatures and avatars, the trolls and the darlings, the colorful CSS, and the overall coziness of logging on and seeing what was happening today. It was really exciting to be on Mugglenet the week before or after a new Harry Potter book was released. And I got some good support on some of the smaller writing forums. But discover-ability was rough. Better as a memory, perhaps.