Lemmy is great and it is in essence an aggregated forum. But I would like to know how I can also find forums about specific topics.
For example I am very interested in football but the only place I can really find any discussion of football is r/soccer on reddit. I would like to find smaller but active forums where the discussions are more slow paced and drawn out over time.
I would like to know how to find these places on the internet, if they still exist, for any topic.
It is what it feels like, but it’s not really 100% this way (yet). It is a bad self-reinforcing cognitive bias: we think “forums are dead, that’s why we stick to the sitename” instead of actually finding dozens of still alive forums and going there, in turn sitename gets more populated while forums feel more dead. But there are still plenty alive. Also, there are relatively new kinds of forums which sometimes work very well for their niche, like Discourse communities for example.