The forums of old times still exist in some corners of the internet. They used to be big and there was one for pretty much every topic.
But most died over the years or got replaced by services like Facebook groups, Reddit or Discord.
Are you still using proper forums, which ones and why haven’t you made the switch to other forms of communication?
Yes I use quite a few and mostly started using them again this past year. The thing that made the big difference was finding the app Hermit. It let’s me have something akin to a separate browser per forum that is fixed to that URL. I then have a bunch of shortcuts on my home screen, one per forum. It made using forums so much easier and streamlined.
Easiest one that comes to mind is the archlinux.org forums. It pops up constantly in searches, even if youre not searching for an arch specific problem, so I used it even before daily driving arch. Now I have an account on there and have made a few posts seeking help. Most of the time though someone has already asked it, and someone else has already provided a solution.
For a bit now I’ve been thinking of starting a small classic style of forum, using the top forum software (to my knowledge at least — xenForo) and writing a custom extension for it to add ActivityPub to it
Idk, I’ve realized that I don’t have a whole lot of time to keep up with live chat communities (like Discord, etc) so I started throwing the forum idea around
Hot rod/muscle car guys still use forums. There’s some good ones that I use for old Mopar stuff.
After ditching Reddit I found most of the car centric subreddit content was just coming from forums that survived because car people were inherently old school, even for EVs. So if you want to know the latest about EV trucks there’s forums for Rivian, Cybertruck, and Lightning. The trouble is that they are all very tribal, so getting unbiased info seems harder. I’m also a fan of older jeeps and they are full of problems, but almost all of them have answers on these forums from the early 2000s with links to geocities pages. Hopefully someone detailed the answer and only linked for supporting details.
Yeah a lot of pro audio discussion still happens on gearspace (formerly gearslutz), KVR, dogsonacid, etc
My RPG club, still use a forum. It’s there to organized games and discuss about RPG
No, but I would like to.
Unofficial DOS Master of Magic forums. It includes subforums for modded versions, including the most excellent Caster of Magic.
I can’t say I really use any of the older style BBS ones like phpBB but there are plenty of smaller software communities using Discourse based forums. For less active communities they are far superior to Discord due to the more asynchronous nature and gives you a lot more control than Reddit/Lemmy.
Rate Your Music and MusicBrainz both use traditional forums, though I haven’t really posted in them lately. I also joined EndeavourOS’ forums at the time I joined Lemmy.
The Artix Linux Forums is the only one I frequent these days.
Any good Linux distro worth their salt has their own version of this. Other platforms just don’t cut it when you need support or have a question specific to your distro specific needs.
Otherwise I very very rarely pop in on Linux Questions or Neovim Discourse to just peruse.
Interesting forums like The Indie Stone have caught my eye as being active for the very niche topic of talking specifically about the Project Zomboid video game, so there is that.
Forums aren’t completely dead, but, sadly, they are starting to go the way of the email mailing lists and irc channels. Still alive…but barely so.
I still do use a few. First one is local one about bass guitars, mainly going there for the great community. Second is another local about PC and hardware. Now thinking about it, I rarely visit others.
There’s one niche dev forum I go on, but only when I have a problem or when it shows up in search results. I used to visit it occasionally but it doesn’t get much traffic
