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Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.
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this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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I think this to be a consequence of forums being isolated from each other, while communities in Discord/Reddit are connected.
If you want to talk about N different topics in forums you need to register N times, check N separated feeds, and establish your presence N times. This quickly piles up, and while you might stick to one or two forums you'll eventually ditch all the others.
In the meantime Discord/Reddit streamline the process. Even if I spend most of my time in r/apples, I'm already able to post in r/bananas, r/cherries, r/durians etc. If I were to subscribe to all of those, I'd see new content from them in a single feed. And people from those comms will see my activity in r/apples and know "hey, this is not a troll", so my presence is already half-established.
The problem is that Discord/Reddit have a single point of failure: the administration can enshittify the whole thing. And they did. Then we get something like the Fediverse picking the best bits of forums (self-governance, no single point of failure) and Discord/Reddit (less isolation).
There are several modern forums that are adapting to that. Notable NodeBB and Discourse are integrating ActivityPub into their software.
And that's extremely sensible from their PoV. Not just to federate with Lemmy or Mastodon, mind you - but to federate with each other.