i started using the internet in the late 2000’s and still remember when you search for something most of the times it would return with a forum post … now its just random websites … if you ever need real and concise answer you have to add site:reddit.com at every search and since discord or twitter are not crawlable by these search crawlers they are not mentioned . Where did all those forums went…are there still active forums ?
Similar reason why people take photos with their phone rather than a point and shoot camera, anyone can do it and it doesn’t require extra work to setup.
Yes, they are less prevalent due to Reddit and other social media sucking up a lot of the users.
They are still around though. One Australian forum that I’ve been on for years which is still very active is Whirlpool. Started as a tech forum and expanded. It’s very useful as source of info as it’s been around over 20 years and a lot of questions have been asked and answered there.
Holy cow late 2000s…man it’s too bad you missed the 90’s. There were TONS of forums and real communities built around hobbies, interests, fandoms, etc. I really really miss them. I had real actual friends online. I blame facebook reddit et al for their demise. These huge websites are like the wal marts of the internet destroying small communities.
It’s more that search engines kind of suck now.
Just to give another perspective, the German part of the internet is still full of extremely niche bulletin board-style forums for every hobby/technology imaginable. Many have millions of posts and have been online for 20+ years. Seems to me like it’s mostly the English-speaking web that’s been affected by these large content aggregators and closed platforms like Discord.
I wish I could read/write German.
I prefer the old forums.
I have noticed that when I search for some specific topics, German websites tend to come up more often. Be it IT or cars, German message boards are well represented (and luckily I can read most of it).
Would that be why there seems to be so much Deutschposting on platforms like Mastodon and Lemmy?
That could very well be. The instances are privately run, have small and personal communities and are often tech-focused so they meet pretty much all the criteria to be popular with Germans lol
Thumpertalk.com is an active forum.
Yep and reddit is slowly closing themselves off, I wouldn’t doubt you eventually have to be logged in to even view anything.
Forums are still around but it’s usually just the older established ones (I’m on stangnet.com and corral.net regularly but they’re car related so lots of technical info). Everything new either went Reddit or Discord it feels like and I’ll never install Discord.
I think Jellyfin started a forum post reddit but I haven’t gone looking yet for that one.
Information is absolutely getting harder to find online and if archive.org goes down we’re really screwed
not fully
Reddit killed forums and Discord took over some of their other functions even though is fucking terrible at it.
Facebook also played a large role in retiring the independent old style of phpbb/vbulletin type forums.
I’m pretty sure Google (and potentially other search engines) de-prioritized blogs and forums. There’s plentry of both out there, although less than there were originally, they’re just being cut out of some search results
Isn’t lemmy basically that, but with modern technology? PHPBB was a nightmare for a sysadmin.
What was/is wrong with PhpBB?
The software was so bad that if you didn’t keep up with emergency security fixes for even a week, the forum would instantly be taken over by someone. Being hacked was the natural state of that software.
It’s right there in the name: PHP
Seriously though maintaining a PHP server is a security nightmare and you have to be constantly updating if you don’t want to be hacked. Just not worth it when there’s better options out there
not organised well tho
These forums never were well organized.
Not quite there yet, but I think Lemmy has the potential to be the best of both. Something you could host without a major company involved, but also attached to a wider community. It isn’t getting the critical mass just yet.
Also, yeah, like a lot of PHP apps at the time, phpBB had some boneheaded decisions. Like “plugins” that didn’t use any kind of API hooks, and instead relied on patching the code directly.
something is needed to be done to bring lemmy to the wider audience else this will also become one of those niche forum sites with the same 1 or 2k people
Lemmy would have to fix federation first, until then it’s just modern forum software.
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Forums still exist. They’re just buried in search results behind SEO garbage sites and video clips because ad revenue. I really despise the direction revenue has pushed the internet…I mean, I get it, sites cost money and people want to make money, I’m getting this stuff for “free”, but the monetization has absolutely destroyed the quality and availability of many things. The brief and concise informative text post has been buried in favor of lengthy videos filled with pointless blather and 5 minutes of actual content because length = ad space, and ad space gets pushed to the top.
That said, some bash places like reddit…but honestly reddit is a forum despite the social media moniker. It’s forums condensed under one roof. No, it’s not as easily searched…but forum searches have generally sucked since the beginning.
They’re out there. Searching [thing im looking for information about]+[forum] will often get you what you want, if it exists.
Am I not on one right now?
I was on several fitness forums back in the 00s. I think some are still around, but largely abandoned. Facebook groups, Reddit, and Discord all seem to have killed them off.
