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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.

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 I already have Jared, the search function is trash and the information is scattered and outdated.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.

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.

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

Also, isn't this interface just forum+?

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The variety and quantity have all been replaced by spaces like Facebook, Youtube, Discord, and Reddit.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.

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.

you just get new topics on top and replies are sorted oldest to newest.

you can do that here too.

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

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.

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.

no. traditional forums were worse than fedi, because you needed an account for every site. that's not the case here.

They’re still alive and kicking.

discourse > discord

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 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.

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 went back to blacksmithforums.com just now, to my surprise, they changed their software. Now I can't find all the posts that I saved about historical researches...

There are still quite many game developers' forums, but what bothers me a little bit is that sometimes the long living ones periodically lost their past.

That's what the Steam Forums are for. I Wonder if Eve Online still has it's fancy website forums.

I still use a traditional forum, so in that sense I don't miss them, no 😁

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

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

I remember back in 2007,2008 etc I had an app on my phone that had tons of forums on it. I spent years on that app reading, learning, screen shorting, so much information. It was my favorite app. Few years later I get a new phone and can’t find that app anymore. There was a woodworking forum, electricians forum, welding forum, weed forum, and so many others. All in one single app.

Couldn’t find any of the forums. Depressing.

Luckily there are still some interesting forums around for specific topics and old school games!

Wake me up when Usenet comes back around.