Bump..

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.

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The variety and quantity have all been replaced by spaces like Facebook, Youtube, Discord, and Reddit.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

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 I already have Jared, the search function is trash and the information is scattered and outdated.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

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.

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.

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+?

I miss forum signatures. The best you can usually get these days is a tiny little piece of flair. It would be fun if Lemmy or something supported forum signatures, though I suppose the moderation for that could be annoying.

I just really liked that level of expression.

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.

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.

The absolute pain of opening an old forum thread with an exact solution/guide and all of the images are long gone.

Of course asking for the same solution on reddit will get you a 300 long chain of useless comments.

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.

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

you can do that here too.

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 feel like forums sucked too because of the lack of sorting.

They just don't scale well to many users. Once you hit a certain number of users, without some method to sort, its just information overload.

Hell, forum threads that are too long inevitably go completely off the rails and become off topic troves.

I think there has to be a better intermediate format, like perhaps a mix of systems, but I think the main thing that makes reddit-likes suck, is their systems of governance.

Something I realized very quickly with lemmy for instance, is that its the not at all benevolent dictator positions that are the big problem. The main incentives for people choosing to spend their time in mod positions still remains to impose their will, whether that be their opinion or power over others speech.

There is something at its core which is wrong with this system at scale. It allows for mods to collect up critical masses of people before then knowing that due to that critical mass they have captive audiences where there is high friction to leave or start something else.

Lemmy has a very bandaid "solution" for this in that there can be multiple of any given community/subreddit, but they all suffer from the fact that whatever a moderator wants is what happens, and even in the worst case scenarios, that is just moved up one layer to admins, who are incentived to appear as hands off as possible on moderators, lest they get turned on by the people who "help" them.

Reddit sucks because of a lot of other profit driven reasons, but I think this is the main structural problem and lemmy shares in this.

Forums have this problem too by the way, but its just that forums are so separate and so bad at handling massive amounts of casual users, that they run into this far less.

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

I definitely miss being able to search the internet for helpful forum posts. The fact that most things are on discord now and not internet searchable is extremely annoying and only going to get worse.

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

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 miss them so badly

This is such a disappointing alternative

They’re still alive and kicking.

You guys are missing out on my badass image signatures.

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.

Personally I think that this Reddit style is an upgrade design wise. And as far as recognising people goes, I'm using an app that lets you tag users (Summit) and this has gone quite a long way. It's also made the start paying attention to other usernames to an extent, so if I notice that someone often posts content that vibes with me or whatever, I can give them a ⭐ or something.

What I do miss from the days when forums were dominant is that people stayed in their lanes a little more. A particular forum or board or even thread is for a particular topic, and people who derailed or came along just to insult and shit on everything were dealt with, without this crying about 'free speech'.

Current day social media has spawned a bunch of people who feel entitled to say whatever they want to whoever they want in any space they want, and cry about blue haired SJWs or something if there's consequences. And they act like the internet used to be this place where forum moderators didn't rule with an iron fist, or like the 'real world' is somewhere that you can behave this way without being punched in the face.

I just think a lot of problems could be solved if jocks went back to discussing sportsball and cars and stayed in their lanes, instead of considering themselves to be experts on biology and sociology and vaccines. There's a fine line between 'free speech' and letting the inmates run the asylum, and the last 10 years have proven that.

Basically what I miss from the forum days is that back then, the conspiracy theorist idiots would've probably been banned, and would've stayed in the fringes of society instead of going mainstream.

I like forums, but maybe I'm part of the problem. I've read a forum obsessively for years without registering an account. Even when I have an account, I rarely post/comment. I've been reading Lemmy almost daily for over a year before registering an account and don't reply much even with an account. Decentralization starts with individuals, so I'm going to try to add signal to the fediverse.

I generally prefer the traditional flat forum UI with oldest first, but that's mostly a client issue. The problem though is if others are using a different UI the conversation may flow differently (think threaded vs flat forums).

RE karma, a lot of forums show post counts and like counts next to their forum profile, which is often included in every reply, so in some ways, the likes (karma) was a little more in your face. I think there was less astro turfing due to scope of benefit. What I mean is that while traditional forums were decentralized, so was the account and its reputation, so karma (like/post count) farming was isolated to that specific forum/community and if you were astro turfing, you'd get banned and lose that and could not transsfer that to other forums. Services like reddit effectively make this transferrable between forums. I'm concerned about how this will play out as decentralized platforms grow. It could be worse than reddit. I've been trying to come up with ways to handle this, but I can find flaws in every idea I've had so far.

Get on some Linux forums.

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 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.

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.

Depending on the topics, Whirlpool is still pretty active: https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/

If you spend enough time and effort in selected communities on Lemmy you can get a similar experience.

And of course the necro-haters when you reply to something that is older than a week. So the spirit of old times is still there.

I miss them, too. I was a member of a writing forum. There were maybe 30-40 very active members. You'd come to know them even if you didn't know their real names. But you'd read from Flower123 in one post and then there was always a category for smalltalk and you'd recognize Flower123 when they wrote about being sick or their hobby. We even had regional meetings for a big poetry forums where 10/15 came to a café. There was just a feeling of being a community.

Unfortunately I am not sure if this would even work today, even if we replicated the forumstructure 1:1. People are more used to consuming media online. You can see that here in Lemmy, too. Many people complain about the lack of content, but not many post or engage. People want to consume, not take an active role in a community. The only reason reddit still kind of works, apart from the bot content, is that it has a giant, international user base so it still feels like a lot of content even if only 10% are very active.

The whole internet culture has shifted from a light-hearted playground to a consumption-based minefield. People use the internet for different reasons. It's a huge difference if I come home from school, ask my parents to use the internet for an hour, go on that one poetry forum that is 80% of my internet activities and interact with the same 30-40 people every day or if I have the internet with me every second of the day and have an endless supply of consumable content that is enjoyable without interacting. People don't really feel like they can/should be an active participant in the discourse anymore unless it's by posting their own, standalone content on platforms like tiktok. And then it's not really an interaction with other people, it's more like everybody is yelling into nothingness.

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

Wake me up when Usenet comes back around.

I still use a few

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

I don't care much about karma (that would be up and downvotes, around here) but I do miss the old forums not being centralized and/or owned by a single entity or authority or, more exactly, not being the only space available no matter who owned it.

This allowed for a lot more divergence of opinions and dissent. There was no such thing with the advent of centralized social media. Which is the reason why I was so happy to jump onboard the fediverse when I heard about it: no more owerpowered centralized/unique owner and censor. Worst thing happening around here, I would still be free to move to another instance, or even create my own. To me, even though I don't think I will ever need it, it's great.

Another thing I miss of back then are blogs. They still exist, but I miss the thriving (and exciting) communities that existed around them, with its engagement(s).

Blogs sometimes allowed for incredibly interesting conversations, between very different persons expressing their various and oftentimes conflicting opinions. It's something I think is badly needed today more than it ever was. Something that would help a lot of us rediscover the true meaning of the word 'discussion' (which is not to agree with one another singing Kumbaya) and would help us re-learn/rediscover the importance of being able to debate with people we disagree with without calling for them to be censored or worse... That neutering logic of the 'either you agree with us/me, or you're out of here' (or, I insist, worse).

That variety (and healthy tension in debating), I miss. It still exists online, but it's rare. It's much simpler to find it offline, irl while having discussions with close friends who are not afraid to speak freely. And inside books... those books whose authors are challenging to read at least. Which sadly means avoiding not all but a large chunk of the contemporary production to focus on long gone writers, classics or not, who trusted/expected their readers to be smart enough to be able to read even the most disturbing ideas without immediately suing them or calling for their cancellation.

Ah, the good old days of the internet. Yes, I miss them. There are still a few around, like the Linux Mint forum, and some other tech-related ones. But it used to be you could find any topic you were interested in and your account and username were specific to it, and they were separate domains (in the normal, non-tech sense of the word). So you might show one aspect of your personality in one forum and a different aspect in a different kind of forum. Just like you would with different friend or acquaintance groups.

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.

I really miss the shit-talking forum on one of my old pirate BBS systems. You could just go a post something with the intent of having a mini flame war with someone… blow off steam. Good fun ☺️

I do miss them, but at least Something Awful is still around

RIP Blizzhackers

and you can sort posts by “latest comment” which replicates the old-school forum experience pretty well, but nobody does it that way

I do it that way, at least on posts with a manageable amount of comments where I actually care about the content of the comments (e.g. threads about someone asking how to do something).

Tremendously. Forums give me a social boost, social media and Reddit-alikes don't. As you say - disembodied voices.

I detest the deliberately ephemeral nature of modern platforms.

Old-school forum with under a hundred people and a couple mods that give a shit is peak but does have problems with stagnation and over-specialization. Casual chat rooms or a -chan style board are a good counterbalance and nobody should exist in only one social space. Reddit et al. is a weird in-between and Discord feels like worse IRC.

Still on a forum for sports

I took a career aptitude test and it told me I should have been a software engineer and idk if that has anything to do with this, but...

Tl;dr: I got high and there's got to be a way to do it in this here vote-time continuum!

On a superficial level, couldn't you get creative with lemmy community settings (using a new sister community) and create only pinned posts/threads (may be subject to mod approval) which are then autosorted by new comments using some scripty pinned post reordering logic? That probably could only apply to a single community though...

The extent of my web design knowledge is limited to fuckin around with myspace html buuut, with more lemmy UI settings, could users elect that certain posts are "forum" worthy? As in, "this is a meme teehee" or "this is a topic worthy of revisiting over a greater period of time" kind of thing. And barring any weird astroturfing, these posts get "pinned" to be revived at the top of the community whenever some reply or top level comment threshold is passed. Inversely, pinned posts could fall away into an archived state after a certain period of no activity, much like the rest of lemmy that's over a week old (whether it's actually no longer active or not).

Getting pinned (hehe) would probably require meeting various straightforward thresholds (like relative or absolute vote value and/or the ratio of upvotes to "pins"). That could determine a sep for how long a post/thread remains subject to revival by reply.

If this configuration were applied to lemmy in general, I think to encourage participation, I'd say it should be an opt-out situation when visiting a specific community (do you want to see community-pinned posts?) and an opt-in situation when choosing to include "active archives" content in a homepage feed.

Not really sure about implementation, but to me it just becomes a secondary voting system as a means to value longevity of a topic, and various ways of incorporating those data into user sorts, community pages, and news feeds that might want to utilize.

Simple as that, right?

^heh^

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

Visit cyberspace.online

I miss Livejournal, the original Livejournal where you were able to tell people intimate things about yourselves and make friends for life.

Kinda but in general, I miss when a online community wasn't a walled garden and is open to everyone. I prefer the format of Reddit/Lemmy as I find some forum thread to be difficult to read as there's few different conversation going on.

One of the things I love about forum is that I know that it can be find via online search. Something nice about finding answers from a smaller-niche website that's away from places like Reddit.

I loooooved online debating back in the day you used to really get interesting and diverse conversations, they'd go on for pages and have a range of perspectives. On a good board you'd have well reasoned and well sourced arguments, and really learn a lot. All that's gone and sadly I don't see it coming back

I still mess around in some traditional forums and I do not miss them.

The time bias is much bigger. First comments are usually the only ones people read and replies. If there's a great comment in page 5 no one is going to see it. But if there's a troll comment in page one it is on everyone's faces. Karma system fixed that.

It's true the thing about usernames and avatars. But I prefer not to personalize a lot so for me that's also a plus, I can focus in the comment and not in who has written it.

I was just thinking, the optimal "reddit"-type site should have been just a big list of links to different forums, and nothing more

No, I never liked the interface with all the conversations mixed so you had to copy most of the thread for context just to add half a line.
I always found them tedious and confusing.

I miss dial-up BBSes that had nothing more than a wall of text, like SASSy was in Montreal. Single line system, no user names or logins, 7 bit ASCII, no colors, no sound, no files.

You just kept dialing until you got the line. Then you'd download all the lines from the last line you left off, then either typed in your stuff or pasted it. If you were super lucky, the sysop would barge in while you were typing.

It was great. Really felt like technology and people mixing well, we even eventually met IRL with "GT"s, Get Togethers.

I miss the sense of fun and adventure and my youth. Especially my youth.

I get the nostalgia, but I do like the thread format of modern forums. Sometimes I don't want to wade through subtopics that people are discussing. I'll just collapse the whole thing and focus on what I want to read. I think it's nicer this way.

Bodybuilding forums led to a notorious debate on the number of days in a week. I feel like a reddit format would water down the debate by not presenting replies as they are posted in real time.

Except for the fact that a lot do the "create an account to see the link". Aside from being annoying, encouraging dead accounts is a security risk, not for the forum but for the users.

Yes. I’m still on one or two but they’re definitely diminished. They had a bad habit of degenerating into factionalism, or losing their plurality of viewpoints due to popularist ideological purity purges.

there are still here, but not very prevelant as before. the problem with some is some mods are very uptight and when admonish you or ban at the slightest notion they think your violating some rule. Also other people giving you snide or condescending response might be harder to deal or report against, and sometimes you cant contradict someone who has older account who gatekeeps the subject of that forum. forum post also dont see much traffic either, usually its gets ignored pretty quickly.

I do too, but all the ones I used to visit have gone offline, and whenever I try looking for one on some relevant topic the most recent post is from 2017.

Have the same feeling, I actually thought about making an alternative threadiverse client in the style of phpBB. But I believe there should still be an option to display comments like threads, it is just easier to use I believe. Default should definitely be new though for comments and posts. Its surprising how well threadiverse would be compatible with message boards.

Which also brought up the question with the fediverse being so open how different people interact with it using different clients.

I like the anonymity, though.

I also notice that I don't pay attention to usernames on Lemmy (or Reddit back when I was on it). They're just disembodied thoughts floating through the ether. On message boards, I get to know specific users, their personalities and preferences and ups and downs. I notice when certain users don't post for a while and miss them if they're gone for too long.

I feel unseen.

Are there forums on Lemmy? I thought it was just memes.

Might be handy if Lemmy allowed to hide karma altogether. You could still up-/downvote (depending on the instance, only upvoting allowed). Or places where karma is disabled by default.

I definitely miss the sense of community and building relationships that I had in forums. In particular, one forum I was on was a great size, diverse members with a shared interest, but we rarely spoke about the topic except to reference it. The off-topic section was where we spent all out time.

Lemmy/reddit feel more distant. I like it but it's a different medium. There are people here I find so smart and funny, but interactions are akin to striking up a good convo while waiting in line at the store, wishing you were friends with them, but knowing you'll probably never see them again.

It's not like these platforms have been around that long. I hope one day a new platform/medium comes along that fills that need.

No, because they haven't gone anywhere.

Not really. There are so many comments in a single Lemmy thread that continuing it would be a fools errand. Old forum threads were not much better besides often having more direct conversations with people. But I find that to be much better on Lemmy than on Reddit too.

Does anybody else miss Compuserve, Delphi, etc?

I want to write mails for mailinglists again :(

They're still around, even if they don't get as much traffic as they used to.

I miss UUCP style forums. They had threading that worked and the concept of 'i've alread read this so don't show it to me again'. Together those made it easy to see well thought out responses weeks latter.

All other forums are worse. They encourage writing something quick - long well thought writing won't be found because by the time someone gets it down the topic is dead.

though the original trolls were from such forums. It should be no surprise that everyone else has them - they change nothing.

obligatory RIP kongregate

in theory, yes; discussion threads, yes; no for questions and answers. people on modern-style platforms can be assholes, but i have wanted to punch a guy from 2007 more times than i can count.

Not particularly.

There was so much to deal with back then. So many different rule sets to follow, so many differences in each community, so many sign-up and on-boarding processes for posting or contributing each.

I miss the internet itself from that time period, and I realize that there is a certain community feel that is missing due to how congregated the current internet is, but I still don't really miss forums specifically all that much.

Mgl, not paying attention to subreddit names and treating everything like I'm swimming through a sea of floating ideas, when posting, is part of why I'm on Lemmy today. Reddit's sadistic mods didn't like it much.

I love the old school forums. I think folks were nicer in them. However, I just couldn't go back for good simply because the UI is not user friendly, and navigating the sub-forums is like going through the labyrinth. Reddit and Lemmy are better due to better UI.

Yes.

Forums have their place. They're the place if you want to talk to experts who will shit on you for not being an expert, get ignored, or get actual help a few days later if you're lucky.

Get the Discourse app and find a forum you like. Or start your own. It’s cheap, I’m spending less than 2 coffees a month to host one.