Are Internet boards and Forums dead

saltynuts420@lemm.ee to Technology@lemmy.world – 232 points –

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 ?

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Discord is pretty much the worst thing that happened to readily available information on the internet (when it comes to games and tech in general at least). No, I don’t wanna join your very specific niche server and use a search function worse than any forum back in the days had in hope to find the information I want.

Also Google got way worse, but that‘s no secret.

I agree. I don’t use Discord at all. Chat rooms always suck for questions/support.

That‘s not even all. The process now is something like:

Search on Google: no answer -> search on Google with Reddit.com appended: no answer -> search on Google with Reddit and Discord Server appended: click through 3 expired invitation links -> finally find a working one: scroll through pages and pages of memes and rule34 content to find the answer you wanted

I want my searchable forums and bulletin boards back ffs.

Search Google-> 5 YouTube videos pinned to the top

Search Google with Reddit appended -> deleted comments in a thread 5 years old not even about my specific problem

Search duck duck go -> numerous highly detailed websites that may or may not be related to my specific problem

The number of those comments that are deleted sure went up a couple of months ago. I wonder what happened 🤔

People falling back behind closed or private barriers for guaranteed human to human interaction and information as AI rises is more and more likely in the future … IMO.

you can search specific channels on discord. if you're seeing memes and r34 while searching for something in a hub server for a game or something then you're not searching correctly. or the thing you're trying to find info on is so niche and poorly organized they have 1 channel.

They got better with threads but not that popular. Still, I prefer forums over Discord.

Discord is like using SMS to run something like Stack Overflow. When subreddits were moving off Reddit (which is good), some were talking about moving to Discord and I could not understand why anyone would think that was a comparable migration option.

I love Discord for gaming with friends. I don't mind some programs using it for releasing things. Like I play Session(skateboarding sim) a decent amount. It's usually used for people throwing up custom maps and mods.

But anytime people talk about going to a discord to really discuss things and keep up with them, I'm just gonna move on.

Discord is just not suitable for any group larger than a WoW guild. I don't understand why anyone would ever think it's a good idea for software/mod projects. Anything that needs to be searched should not be on discord

"Join our discord".

No I don't think I will. I don't want to chat. I want to RTFM.

Two months ago I started using Kagi as a Google alternative. It's amazing how much of a difference it makes not having to wade through a list of sponsored links first and actually getting the results I want.

$10 a month seems a lot for a search engine, but maybe it's just because I've gotten used to all of them being free.

I am on kagi's free trial right now actually. Honestly i thought i searched more than i have so far. I have been on the 100 search trial for like 3-4 days now and have only used like 11 or 12 searches. I never paid attention to how much i searched before. The great thing is that they accept crypto now.

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Aren't we like, on a forum right now?

Also, yes, the more traditional style of forums are still around too.

I would even argue that Lemmy is more of a return to traditional forums from reddit due to the independent nature of each instance.

I wouldn't say its a return of traditional forums. Far from it really design wise. I think its more of a return to independence and decentralization. I think we're done with the whole "Web 2.0. Everything in one convenient place" and want to back to an era where things were much harder to find and communities were a lot more separated and dedicated to their own spaces. The fediverse isn't the end all be all and we're gonna suddenly go back to the 90s but to me, it's an honest step in the right direction that could really change the internet for the better.

Not done with it. We want both decentralization and everything in a convenient place. Best of both worlds. So we end up with a discussion board that is also an rss reader, aka the activitypub protocol.

I'm hoping your right, that it changes the web for the better. But most people follow advertisements right back into the clutches of corpo-controlled products.

most people follow advertisements right back into the clutches of corpo-controlled products.

The thing is I expect places like Lemmy and even Mastodon to eventually fall to this behavior. The reason I'm even viewing them as services that should be must for the common user is the mere ability to even move out without having to leave everything behind (if you catch what i'm saying) thats the real core difference and hope that I have. The problem is again like anlumo said, defederation is definitely going to be a major hurdle and one where major companies will especially take advantage of.

Unfortunately federation doesn’t work with Lemmy. I have to create a new account on nearly every instance, because they defederate all the time due to spam and CP issues.

So, it’s a regular forum again.

Defederation is honestly both toxic and history repeating itself i guess. There's reasons for it but it'll pass.

It’s an inherent problem with the way federation is designed in the Fediverse. Since all content is replicated, this includes stuff like CP. If the admins wouldn’t defederate after learning about it, they’d willingly host it, making them legally liable.

Yeah. Lemmy and Reddit are basically mega-forums. The voting and threading systems went a huge way toward solving the problems that made traditional forums unworkable at large scale. e.g. there were always 8 pages of replies to trudge through to find one relevant answer. (XDA is a great modern example of this problem. Woe to those who find an XDA thread while troubleshooting.)

It was also so, so much easier for someone to make a subreddit than host and maintain their own phpBB server. I am speaking from experience on both ends, there.

Reddit killed the traditional forum, and you know what? Good. It was time.

The same problem makes large Discord painful to use.

the more traditional style of forums are still around too.

They’re very rare these days though. It’s a whole lot easier to keep all your interests in one place rather than heading off to one forum for gaming chat and another for programming chat and another for gardening chat.

Keeping it all in a single feed means your interest can be piqued at random times and you’ll be more likely to interact.

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 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

Isn’t lemmy basically that, but with modern technology? PHPBB was a nightmare for a sysadmin.

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.

Lemmy would have to fix federation first, until then it’s just modern forum software.

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

What was/is wrong with PhpBB?

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

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.

There are still plenty of active forums. Some of the old forum platforms didn’t make the shift to mobile very gracefully, and most of them have failed to put out good apps. So there are casualties by the road of change to be sure.

Reddit is huge and became a platform for forums. A lot of groups are also stuck on Facebook. Sigh.

But there are probably more active forums than ever, because there’s just so much more of everything on the internet now. Posting online used to be such a niche nerd thing to do. Most wouldn’t think of it. Social media cracked that egg open. Your grandma posts to a Facebook group.

Of course, if your definition of forums is super specific to the early days, it’s a different picture. There may be fewer vBulletin 2.0 powered web forums than 10 years ago… but there also may not.

That's a good point. A really good app that can parse a standard framework that a thousand independent forums can stand up for their own purposes (Say, MyBB for instance), would go a long way towards reviving the forum scene as a whole with a very Lemmy-like or reddit-like experience.

Yeah Tapatalk tried to do that for VBulletin but the problem is that little vBulletin sites don’t have very deep pockets to delve. Little forum sites are supported by small time revenue like network ads, and limited brand sponsorships and the occasional member donation. There isn’t a lot of money in this scene as a whole, so there is relatively little innovation. In a way that’s fine. The last thing forums want is mass participation.

Make it a FOSS project then. No profit motive, no problem, right?

Granted, I understand that's hinging on someone actually wanting to work on this project for free. But I feel like FOSS decentralized forum software is something we might be able to get the grognards on board with.

Are there other good examples of successful open source mobile apps? Where the app client itself is open source?

That app already exists and is called Tapatalk. I think almost every forum I've visited in the last decade has a banner on mobile that suggests using Tapatalk.

It's not very good though it seems.

Unfortunately those kind of apps would trip cloudflare's bot protection feature, which is used by a lot of independent forum operators.

You're either incredibly centralised on a platform you don't control, or incredibly fragmented between different smaller groups.

People hosted their own forums as there was no viable alternative, and you didn't care about legal liabilities, data governance, right to be forgotten, DDoS protection etc.

Most people (not all) will choose the easy option of an existing service. Of which the value for that service is to lock you in and spend all your time there.

Saying that I'm still active on multiple forums, but they've been around for years, and it's definitely an older nerdier demographic.

Vehicle related forums are very much alive. It’s the best place you can go to get help with your car. I hang around on a couple different ones and it’s far better than anything I’ve seen on Reddit.

Yep. Whenever I get a new vehicle or motorcycle, I always search for a forum for it and get way more info on common problems (and usually great ways to deal with them), hacks for the software, cool mods and accessories (usually ending up costing me thousands of dollars in parts I wouldn't have known I "needed" if I stayed away, but...) tips and tricks for maintenance, and lots of useful info in general

just want to fully second this based on experience.. information i got from forums really helped me with my most recent purchase.. both with making the decision in the first place, and with finding aftermarket parts that my specific run of that model really needed.. helped a ton..

Have you got any links to some?

if you look for Honda Accord forums for example, you would eventually be able to find nearly all the info you need to build one from scrap..

When I started, you'd go to the relevant usenet group and typically found worldwide experts in whatever.

Alas, times change.

Dead Internet Theory for all the bots out there reading this.

Not sure I believe this has already happened, but I certainly believe we're headed in that direction

All of those things do happen but to say they’re the only thing happening…

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.

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

XDA is pretty active

Niche phone ROMs are always found on telegram and it's really annoying. I don't want to use telegram. Especially since if I'm on XDA looking for ROMs it's because my phone is fucked and telegram requires a phone to set up and login

It's mind boggling that any privacy focused community uses Telegram.

Its the most privicy friendly app with "brand recognition". Not really saying much

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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.

I main 4chan. It is alive and kicking, as far a garbage bin full of maggots is alive and kicking.

There are the alternatives too!

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.

I was just thinking about this the other day. It's weird how Google has become so unusable due to its own practices that it seems to be giving up on being a search engine. I've been getting spam pop-ups lately on mobile search asking me to use AI. Of course people will wanna use it, they can't find their answers normally anymore. You search for something and it'll show you something completely unrelated because it's trying to be "helpful" and corral you towards buying shit, and it doesn't even do a good job at that. Heaven forbid you start to look past the first 3 pages.. I don't have a clue how these websites in the search results are maintained when they're filled solely with spam and nonsensical gibberish. I'm totally with you. We used to actually see communities around and now it seems like they've fallen into the dark web, unfindable except by means of knowing someone who knows someone or, frustratingly, reddit. Paradoxically, it's like the random AI-generated hash from the dark web is now here clogging up the tubes. I feel like everyone else came along and started dumping trash everywhere because we didn't put up any signs or make any rules not to litter.

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.

They’re definitely still around. A lot of vehicles have specific forums that are very active.

I actually really miss the old IMDB forums from before Amazon bought the site and killed them. I love film, and it was great to have specific forums for every movie or actor.

It was. Until it became very damn toxic. Just as bad as Steam boards are today. Did it become too popular for its own good? Did the good moderators give up? Or is it just me that are too sensitive, and are unable to be as aggressive as is trendy?

It'll vary, there's a lot of forums out there from the car-model-specific (Piloteers) to makes (Kia-Forums) to more general ones like Bob is the Oil Guy. But there's a lot of tech ones with cobwebs all over (Windows Central) and many that have disappeared entirely. (1src, webOS Nation/Precentral)

Not dead but definitely on life support. I really do miss old forums. Reddit / Discord / Fediverse don't come close to the old community feel. Facebook groups aren't so bad sometimes for that but then the content is organised terribly. Say what you will about forum search engines but I could always rely on being able to enter a keyword or two and get what I was looking for.

A lot of forums I frequented were actually pretty well organised with subforums. It just isn't the same these days.

Also web forums were the absolute best for petty drama. I do miss that in a weird way. Always that one angry gatekeeper flaming everyone.

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.

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

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.

All the forums I visited and participated in twenty years ago have been overrun with right clowns shouting into the void hoping to be noticed by anyone.

Weird, I’ve never had issues of Reddit posts not being included in the top five results.

It’s actually the opposite issue. I’m finding in need to remove Reddit to get any meaningful results sometimes.

I know City-Data Forums is still pretty active. I've used it a lot when deciding on places to move. I'm also a bit of an urban design nerd and there's a lot of fascinating discussion I come across there.

Depends on the subject, though they are definitely nowhere near as popular nor used anywhere near as much as in the past. Niche groups can probably be found, but I wouldn't know too much about where to look since I usually don't go to them.

Closest I go to is Steam Underground and that is just for certain files.

I'm a member of a couple of hobby-specific forums that are still doing okay and I think there is still some life left for them. The nice part is they tend to attract subject matter experts who will answer questions from newbies without the nastiness you see on StackExchange. The small number of users and the lack of public visibility keeps a lot of trolls away. But there aren't many left. Lots of them moved to groups on Facebook or other venues where the owner no longer has to manage their own server. When they do that sometimes their archives get lost, which sucks since who knows how long social media sites will keep things or whether they'll surrender the data for someone else to archive.

There's still a lot, but they're generally niche or are more business related (eg. answers.microsoft.com). Hosting fees and technical knowledge have lead to many people just using reddit or facebook groups.

For gaming there's places like ResetEra and I think SomethingAwful still has their forums going.

There's a ton of support group like ones, often related to certain medical conditions.

SomethingAwful is still kicking, although Lowtax is dead and no one mourns him, but that’s a story for a different time. I’m coming up on 18 years there myself. It’s been a lot more than just gaming for a long time though, and before Reddit, it was the place where memes were born.

I should give it a try. I used to read the front page every day but never joined the forums since I was a broke kid.

I recently started posting on Doomworld and it's been such a nostalhia trip being on a normal forum after so many years. SA might be worth it just for the nostalgia alone.

There's tons of active Q&A format Discourse forums for different things that I've ran into.

Forms are definitely less active than before but they're not dead yet

The forums i visit, grapheneos', cryptomator's and privacy guides', are alive.

Isn't usenet supposed to be a forum? Why don't people use it?

i remember when google ingested the newsgroup archive and spit it back out as deja news.. it was a tech support gold mine