Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.

The worst is Discord. It doesn't show up in search engines and somehow you have to know that is where you are "supposed" to go for help. Privacy issues aside, I am fine with discord for playing games with friends or big conventions/LAN parties, but I don't understand why anyone would use it as a forum.

Yeah I remember voicing this concern when all online communities seemed to be going to discord and people seemed to mainly laugh at me in response at the time.

Fuck Discord

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).

Funny thing...an internet forum group from 23 years ago is slowly reforming because everyone is sick of the same thing re:socmed

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.

You should be using Lemmy instead of Reddit. It's defederated, and it's spread out over 600 Instances in many different countries. This way, one rich egomaniac can't ruin it for everyone else.

I run a forum where the first post was started 23 years ago. Although the activity has drastically gone down during recent years, people still occasionally come by. I'm very happy I kept it up, even though a lot of people switched over to a Discord server.

Recently we had an incident where the sole admin of the Discord server was banned and the whole Discord had to be abandoned and created from scratch. People still keep using this trash! I'm not arguing with them, I'll just keep an alternative up. One day, when Discord really enshittifies itself to a point where it becomes unuseable, people will be happy for my stubborness. I hope.

(It's a forum for an obscure space pirate game for the PC - I-War 2. Its first post is here.)

They've been dissapearing for a long time, if they were an animal, they'd be somewhere between Endangered, and Critically Endangered..

The eye-opener now has been that Reddit has turned into corpo/authortiarian boot licking trash, and Discord is planning on going publicly traded. (Read More Corpo bootlicking trash)

Back in mid 00s I created a forum for fellow classmates to share notes, info on exams and whatever. It was active for a year or a bit more, then someone set up a Facebook page for our group and the forum died in about a month. I could not understand why people migrated so quickly, Facebook group was atrocious when it comes to search functions, any files, notes or anything you didn't download immediatelly were lost to time never to be seen again. If the forum is still up I'm sure I'd still be able to easily download exam schedules and all notes from all the classes there, with Facebook it was a pain even a week after someone posted. There is something fundamentally wrong with society if an inferior product can sweep the board so easily. People do not care about quality or usefulness of anything, all that matters is marketing and trends.

There are tons of forums out there, the search engines just won't show them to you. The search engines are the real problem.

I'm sort of tired of articles describing some catastrophe that happened ten years ago and saying "it's worrying."

I'm so inspired by the Fediverse, the social options we have these days are just magical.

A decade ago, Diaspora got press because they were going to build an alternative to Facebook. But there was hype and then there was disappointment.

Now, everybody knows how terrible legacy social media is. Everybody knows. Sure, most people are still stuck there. But these vibrant alternative places exist! The options are exciting! It is so much better than it's ever been!

Just keep building. This is great, and it's only just started.

I hate Reddit, and I hate discord.

I am using discord for a discussion thread of one thing which follows a serial webnovel and it's infuriating because when something new happens there's always a constant influx of people asking the same questions because there is no way to pin or highlight pertinent information and no one is going to go scrolling through a million messages searching for the first time the question was asked and answered.

Discussion threads! Not chat messages!

Forums are where I learned literally everything about technology I know now. Every hack, jailbreak, method of bypassing something, building, literally anything I’ve done around my tech hobbies. Pi hole, emulation in the late 90s, how to use Photoshop, how to run Linux from a USB, everything I’ve learned from forums. I’m sad to think that me joining certain discords help deliver the death knell to the concept of forums.

It is a problem, but I think it downplays the reason those platforms got popular.

1. No admin required. No updating of software to make sure you're not going to get compromised by a vuln.
2. No account management. You don't have to make a new account, and manage another password for every community you use. Also, no worrying about 1 when somebody like me can't be arsed to update that forum software. I don't want an account for everything.
3. It's all in one place. You look at your "feed" of things and your stuff with a new post every week is right there with the stuff with new posts every ten minutes.

If you're running a big community you shouldn't be building it somebody else's garden, but you do need to manage the garden yourself and it's not super trivial and maybe your little Final Fantasy XIV group can make do with a corner of Discord and abandon it when it goes real shitty. If you've got 50,000 people, it gets a little trickier.

The Fediverse goes a little way to fixing things, but it's all a trade off. Not having corporations involved is a damn good start though.

Ugh, Discord is an information black hole. I despise how so many of my niches have fled there.

Reddit seems to be trying to destroy that "role" of theirs as hard as they can though. A few very niche subs I follow are drying from some kind of "bug" that deprioritizes their discoverability.

It’s not a bug. It’s absolutely a feature for making Reddit more generic, farmable garbage and noise.

Subreddits were not a problem before since they were accessible on the web without needing an account. But now reddit is gradually locking them down behind authwalls and things like not letting search engines index (other than Google).

Lemmy communities dont have this problem and because lemmy is federated, its resistant to such enshittification (plus you can easily create your own lemmy instance for only your team). So imo they are a good alternative to forums (and reddit) and a good solution to this problem.

Don't worry, the enshittification of both is proceeding well.

Replacements are inevitable in time. This one is growing.

This is unironically on reddit right now. People lamenting a place like Lemmy doesn't exist.

I'm less worried about Discord, honestly.

If anyone is looking for a pretty good list of forums-

https://aftermath.site/best-active-forums-internet-today?ueid=6310597850b065b278e2b143b21b73b5

Reddit is shadow banning people in droves for bad upvotes

Forums are still alive in ultra niche communities. My favorites: Badger and Blade for wet shaving, Snuffhouse for snuff tobacco, Quantnet for quantitative finance. All of these gather way better content and users than their Reddit counterpart, which usually devolves into memes and pic of the day stuff

I just closed my The Guardian UK version account. I used to comment on the news stories. I can no longer be arsed because of the stress it causes - 99% of comments are so damn stupid and adrift from reality. Most of the comments are from people who (1) voted Labour in order to get change despite being warned by Labour itself, as well as everyone on the Left, that it was not offering change and (2) are now belly-aching because Labour is too Rightwing for them and no better than Tories. Starmer says he 'likes and respects Trump' - what the fuck!?! Leopards are eating Labour voters' faces and they are lacting shocked? If you say so, your comment gets deleted by the moderators because we are not allowed to be truthful or challenge MSM's imaginary version of the world which is carefully curated to be cosy and profitable. Fuck 'em all.

I only want to hear from people willing to face reality. I need to find a community that is living in the real world not in some self-indulgent fantasy in their head like most British voters seem to be. I reckon that the age of social media is dead because the age of comfort is over. It was fine wasting time on posting nonsense when you were not watching a coup or seeing WW3 developing in real time or could still believe that whatever happened online, offline life was ticking over normally and you could still feed yourself, access housing, get healthcare, rely on benefits if you were sick or old. All of that safety in real life is gone - so to survive this shock we bunker-down and that means finding your village to shelter with because who wants to bunk with Nazis or cultists?

There will still be social media going forward but it will be fragmented because in times of war, you take a side and you do not fraternise with the enemy. Anyone lamenting this is pretending we still live in the past when you could get along with others and 'two side' debates because actually you agreed on 90% of stuff and were disputing details. Now we dispute the nature of reality and fundamental morality and there is no two sides to such existential matters. I mean it has been brewing for almost a decade (i.e. in the west, started much longer ago in places like Russia and 'untruth no reality stop-think' probably infected the west from those places) - ever since the rise of 4chan and bizarre conspiracy theorists started undermining reason, was turbo-charged by the pandemic, and started to infect reality via stuff like brexit and MAGA. There is no excuse to be surprised that we are here, it was clearly signposted for years.

I know it is the Far-Right who brought us to this crisis but as a radical Leftist I say 'bring it on!' You started this conflict, I am determined people like me will win it. I just need to find my comrades and unite in push-back. I get my inspiration from democracy protests like those currently happening in Serbia, Greece, Turkiye. Why is there nothing like that scale of reaction in USA or UK? Because most people in those places are still feeling comfortable and do not grasp the reality of the crisis they are in. They will not react until it is too late. They frustrate me past expression!

I needed to vent.

I for one would want a more open source system where a single guy running a server doesn't have all the power in the forum. It would be awesome if a fedi form of forums took over and one could replicate all the info as relays.

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

Honestly reddit's (and Lemmy's) comment formatting structure is so much better than other forums that it's been part of the reason why I don't want to use the other ones.

What are we going to do about it?

Do nothing, nothing about it. The great hordes of the unwashed have ruined every single place they've showed up starting in the early 90s. They don't want to be saved from the commercialization that has taken over the internet, to the contrary they thrive on it and are willing to put up with nearly anything to attract and keep it.

If most of Reddit shifted over to Lemmy it would get commercialized into a smoking crater. As soon as there's enough regular people using a thing the companies and venture capitalists will show up and at that point the game is over.

The best of the internet has always been built by and populated with people who don't fit into a box. It's that internet people keep trying to bring back but you can't hold the castle once it's being assaulted by the normies.

So the solution is to do nothing. Let the normies stay in their palaces of commercialization and corruption. It's for the best.

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.

Every forum I used before Reddit even existed is still active (hell, PHPBB was updated as recently as November!) and new platforms, like Lemmy, pop up all the time . IDK what the fuck these articles are talking about. Maybe they just don't know how to actually find anything on the web? 🤷🏻‍♂️

How do we create more forums?

I believe this is what they call "preaching to the choir".

Everytime I want to look for modern solutions to newer projects online it's always in the damn discord. I have like 20 discords in folders just because I feel like I'll need them to troubleshoot eventually.

Reddit is literally unusable now. I use old.reddit to browse certain subs but there’s no point commenting or interacting cause pretty much everything gets you banned

I think this is an XY problem.

People keep trying to bring back the old internet ; This is an broken and outdated solution.

The root problem (in my opinion) is that we need to share critical information to the masses, but the masses introduce "tyranny of the majority". It's a really tricky problem to figure out, and I really really really want mathematicians working on this.

If you live in the states, the Electoral College exists because they were looking for a practical solution to this problem. Considering the outcomes, it did not work - but there is no shame in this, as I think this is actually a really hard problem to solve.

The only known solution is to not share information to the masses (a.k.a keeping the normies out). In essence, this is what the old internet was - and a large part of what made it great. But this is not correct as it does not meet the criteria of the problem. Nor does it translate well, since your neighbors are apart of the masses.

If anyone has any thoughts on this, please share. If you do math for a living, please gather your friends and make an open-thesis about this.

EDIT

After some discussion in the comments, I have a general hypothesis:

• One platform, one name.

People must be able to distinguish the resource they are accessing - highly recommended this process be easy. This provides consistent "edges".

• Open protocols only.

Looking at "tyranny of the majority" from a different perspective, one answer is to standardize how people communicate. This means no closed ecosystems nor convoluted protocols. This provides "standard weight" while preventing "infinite weight".

• Server-wide censorship cannot be allowed.

This eliminates every platform I know of. Servers should not be given any tools to prevent incoming nor outgoing data. People should handle moderation individually - sane UI can of course be made available (BlueSky block filters could be inspiration?). Blocking should only be handled by the "nodes", this also prevents "infinite weight".

I find it really funny that this conclusion kind of alludes to the early internet in a lot of ways. Maybe it wasn't the internet-forums, but the internet itself that has changed.