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?
Yeah a lot of pro audio discussion still happens on gearspace (formerly gearslutz), KVR, dogsonacid, etc
The forums on the metal archives are still active and a good resource for various different things concerning extreme metal. Bits of news, discussion, and some out of left field recommendations that I don’t find other places.
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.
I was active on an “Old Web Revival” forum for a while last year. I was expecting it to be populated by nostalgic gen x and millennials, but it turned out to mostly be zoomers romanticizing the '90s and thinking they could save the internet with Neocities.
After realizing I was the oldest person there I felt like a bumbling grandpa telling meandering stories of the way it used to was, so I eventually left. I haven’t been able to find another retro nostalgia forum since then.
Melonland?
That’s the one. I felt bad leaving without a word but it was spur of the moment. I just got the sudden realization like I was a teenager still hanging out in the McDonalds Play Place and quietly noped out the door.
Not that I have anything against gen z. I just couldn’t relate to most of what they were saying. So I guess a better analogy is that I was like an old man wandering around the mall surrounded by teenagers. Except malls are dead now so gen z still won’t relate. Hence: bumbling grandpa.
I also joined the RetroDaze forum before that but there were only two or three other active users and I got the impression at least one of them was an “I voted for Trump” type of guy.
I do get that. I like the place for the discussion as answers seem to be lengthy and generally well thought out, but I do get the impression there’s a lot of zoomers there. I just like the idea of a personal site and have found a lot of useful info and ideas there, but yeah totally understand where you’re coming from.
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.
This one. I don’t like the other things you mention. I did join a sub reddit on the topic years ago, but it was awful. Full of people who didn’t know anything of the subject, but were very willing to downvote.
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.
My RPG club, still use a forum. It’s there to organized games and discuss about RPG
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.
Hot rod/muscle car guys still use forums. There’s some good ones that I use for old Mopar stuff.
Aviation types still hang out on Pprune.org.
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.
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
Rarely, i only check rateyourmusic foeum from timw to time that’s all
I use xss(.)is for unique tech stuff.
