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Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.
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Yeah, forums were pretty cool!
this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
1952 points (99.1% liked)
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I'm getting two points from the article. One is addressed handily by the Fediverse, the other is not.
First the centralized (I prefer to say "urbanized") nature of social media means a handful of companies control all the conversations. The Fediverse is a decent (though not perfect) solution to that problem, and I think everyone on here knows that.
However, the article also talks about the problems with the format of social media, not just who's hosting the platform. On traditional forums, conversations can last for years, but on Reddit, Discord, etc. new topics quickly bury old ones, no matter how lively those old topics are. Sure, you can choose to sort by "last comment" which replicates the traditional forum presentation with topic bumping, but it's not the default, even on Lemmy, so 90% of people won't bother.
I get to know people on traditional forums, even miss them if they leave, but on Reddit, comments are just disembodied thoughts manifesting in the ether. That may be due to the size of the community rather than the format, though.
Yeah, those old forum threads really were great. Many forums had threads that were discussing topics for years, all in one place. There were people posting how they were building something and they would just reply to their thread with an update. It's a great way to collect information and better than we are doing it here
I'd like to see a federated, self hostable forum platform. I believe NodeBB is implementing or has implemented activitypub, but while it's open source it seems even less of a turnkey solution than Lemmy or Mastodon.
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Funny thing...an internet forum group from 23 years ago is slowly reforming because everyone is sick of the same thing re:socmed
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“Now”? Try 10 years ago, at the very least.
No, enshittified search engines are only catalogging those because they're in the AI bed with them.
Your Favorite Forum still rules.
without forums or decentralized social services i wouldn't have met my husband
Maybe Lemmy is a 2020s version of phpBB (the forum software, which is open source like Lemmy is). Lemmy and phpBB can both be hosted by anyone, but of course the interesting thing about Lemmy is that Lemmy servers can share their content with each other.
I actually just launched a PHPBB forum for specific interests in regards to the indie web, building websites, and sharing random banter (among a few other things). I find Reddit and Lemmy to be useful for seeing what's going on in the world overall, and Discord has mostly just been annoying ever since its launch, and forums seem like a good answer to recreating actual communities. And if there are more people who feel this way, maybe they'll make a comeback (because they definitely haven't just started to be affected by corporations attempting to centralize everyone to one thing).
Do you have a link to your forum? Edit: nvm I just found it linked on your website :}
Haha sorry, would have responded earlier but am stuck at work
Here is a chrome extension that copies all messeges and media from a discord server you're a part of.
In case the stuff on a server is what keeps you coming back.
I’m looking for a study group for a specific maths textbook I’m reading
Discord math forum is too big and my queries get swamped so I don’t use it
I’d appreciate some advice on this and also how to develop my federated use of the internet
Maybe !math@lemmy.world ?
Cheers I’ll check it out and revert back
Edit: does an app like lemmy have the foundation to host something like a “specific math textbook forum” where subsections are dedicated to individual textbooks?
Not right now, unfortunately. But it looks like tags like on Reddit are planned in the future. Right now I'd just create a post with the specific question. There are helpful people, for sure. :)
On one hand I want to foster discussion so I don’t mind older posts being buried.
However it would be good to have the space organised by text books perhaps, but this may eventually get stale
I was thinking tags would be useful but i don’t know effective it would be to have #ArbitraryBook #ChapterOne #Question13 as tags to search for? Would it even work?
No perfect solution for this currently, unfortunately.
But let the information flow. Create a post and look for feedback if people would be interested in a specific community on the topic of the textbook. There are a lot of scientists here, so there is surely a space for your topic.
Let us know if you find something!
Thank you, I’ve posted in math.lemmy to see if anything crops up
It’s why I went to the Chime.In app. It’s not perfect, but it’s not Reddit
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Let’s hope the resurrection of Digg starts to fill this void.
Digg well just be another reddit. I don't expect Venture Capitalist Rose to be the saviour.
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