I miss traditional message boards. No karma, no sorting algorithms, you just get new topics on top and replies are sorted oldest to newest.
You can have forum threads that go on for decades, but Lemmy’s default sorting system quickly sweeps older content away. I’m aware you can mimic the forum format by selecting the “chat” option in a thread and sorting by old, and you can sort posts by “latest comment” which replicates the old-school forum experience pretty well, but nobody does it that way, so the community behaves in the manner facilitated by the default sorting algorithm that prioritizes new content over old but still relevant content.
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.
Yes and no… I miss the internet from the time period of traditional forums; but the forums themselves… I’m not 100% sure. The community feel was arguably better back then, and I do agree with you about not paying attention to usernames on Lemmy or Reddit vs getting to know specific users. There’s something about associating an image, or a signature with a user that we don’t really get on the more modern platforms.
I think it’s a problem of scale. Lemmy and Reddit have very large user-bases for a plethora of topics and interests, all congregated within a common location. Forums were for specific sets of interests with recurring, smaller user-bases.
Maybe we could get something that’s a hybrid of both by bringing back signatures with animated gifs at the end of each post we make on Lemmy.
hmmm I hadn’t thought of avatars and sigs being part of it but you have a point. Did Reddit even have Avatars before they started pushing their profile pic customizer thing? Even then they’re pretty small, likewise on Lemmy, so there’s not much room for personality, and as can be seen here a lot of people just don’t bother.
Did Reddit even have Avatars before they started pushing their profile pic customizer thing?
I don’t believe so. At least, I don’t recall anything like that. That profile pic customerizer thing was stupid AF.
I think the closest we can really get is when people put an icon next to their name… which works on the browser, but not if you’re using an app.
Depending on the topics, Whirlpool is still pretty active: https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/
Get on some Linux forums.
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.
Everyone here saying they still exist.
That’s not the point.
:-/
It kinda is, though. “I’m here, rather than over there, because I’d rather product content complaining about a lack of a thing than adding to the content of the thing I say I wish I had”.
I miss them because is was a concentration of each niche and there usually wasn’t much competition. No competition for “likes” or whatever.
I think its easy to mis-remember the past. But the idea that people on forums weren’t competing for attention, or that whole communities weren’t competing for degrees of participation, is a product of nostalgia. Jump over to 4chan - a very Old Internet relic - if you don’t believe me.
The thing you remember was the fun you had in your younger days doing a thing you were passionate about. And the thing you hate about Social Media is largely the absence of fun.
I’ll tell you what was good about the old school forums. Once you got up the right combination of browser add-ons, there were no ads. I go on Instagram now and I’m getting 2-3 ads for any given real post. I’m getting a flood of click-bait “Suggested For You” content I didn’t subscribe to or ask for. I’m getting pop-ins and notices and updates and reminders shoved on me. That’s what fucking sucks in Web 2.0/3.0 Just a deluge of corporate shit raining on you at every interaction.
But this dogged insistence that the newer model of forum organization - the Reddit or Wikipedia content ranking formula, rather than the traditional Groups organized by Last Update - is somehow ruining the internet… I just don’t see it. What I see with the newer model is more images and videos, which would have sunk an old school dial-up powered forum 30 years ago.
And I think what old-heads are really asking for is a community that doesn’t use thumbnails/images/videos in the feed. And I’m sympathetic to that. I’m just not nostalgic for fucking WoW forums or SomethingAwful posters or 90s-era content rings. Just like with the modern internet, that era was choked with shitty posters, bot posters, and endless scams. Those things just weren’t memorable in the same way as the fun stuff.
When someone says “I miss the old forums” I think they probably know they still exist and are lamenting the lack of the ubiquity of them and not a total disappearance.
As for the rest, yeah. The internet has always been that way. Shitty mods, trolls, whatever.
Yeah, threaded conversations based on replying to comments and sorted by a recency/popularity algo are less usable, in some ways. But the forum format of sorting everything by most recent reply and only being able to append to the end of a conversation has it’s own issues. So I don’t think one is worse than the other, it’s more like the difference between how threading and replies work on email vs. IM, they each have their uses and their drawbacks.
Yeah, forums exist but they have a real hard time growing their userbase these days. It’s just more deliberate to visit a particular forum’s website, then usually click on a subforum, then look at a thread, and then see its contents. Then you might be on page 37 of a thread and people are all discussing that post from page 33. It’s slow compared to something like Reddit/Lemmy or Xitter style sites that put the content right in your face without having to look around.
I’m prone to falling for this myself even as I lament forums growing quiet. But I guess the best thing to do is link directly to forum threads from other social media and hope enough users trickle in.
What I REALLY hate is Discord servers replacing forums for things like video game FAQs and it’s really hard to find the latest announcement, bug workaround, or whatever without butting into the conversation and asking (you’re the 48th person to ask today and people are a little annoyed).
Discord’s format 100% absolutely sucks. It’s like they took one look at how forums normally work and decided to do the exact opposite and mix it with IRC to boot. I almost never use it.
I’m just confused by the notion that discord could replace forums. To me it’s always been a messaging service first and foremost. You can have something resembling a forum discussion on some servers, but that’s really just allowing users on a specific server to make a channel with a specific subject for live discussion to happen at, it just happens that since it’s so niche that people leave messages and come back to it later forum style.
And that’s not even to mention how discord’s search functionality is garbage, or how anything on a discord server is basically non-existent to search engines.
I love discord but that’s probably because I don’t use it that way. It’s just a casual chat space for me. I would probably go nuts if I tried to use it like a forum substitute.
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.
I’m probably wrong, but the first app that comes to mind is Tapatalk
That might be the same app I used, but I think it was a different name back then. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t find it.
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 😅
There’s a big Italian eMule piracy forum, I don’t know if it’s a good idea to link it here, but it starts with dd and ends with unlimited. It’s based on old-school PhpBB.
Speaking of piracy, another Italian forum is MIR followed by “crew”, they share torrents over there.
If you can manage the language barrier, there’s a lot of good content over there (usually with double language: Italian + original).
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.
The problem though is if others are using a different UI the conversation may flow differently
Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. You CAN recreate the message board experience on Lemmy pretty faithfully by sorting posts by latest comment (like the bumping system of forums) and setting comments to “chat” which flattens the comment tree, and sorting oldest to newest, but nobody does that so the community doesn’t develop around it.
I miss the annonimity of them, and the lack of robots crawling them
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 wish there was a way to sync those comments between apps and devices.
Gimme a good tag and I promise I’ll always upvote you and support your views comrade 🤝
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.
Google deprioritized smaller forums and it sort of killed them.
Yeah, sure, but a number of them still exist. They’re just mostly reliant on word of mouth now (or using something other than Google). There’s some old Star Wars forums that seem to still be surviving, for example.
Yea not literally dead I still visit some, but there was a huge drop off in activity when google tweaked their ranking
Oh GameFAQs! That was my first foray into the forum experience along with Gaia Online around 2003 or so. I’ve hung out on other forums that are sadly now defunct. If anyone remembers the first big cloud gaming service OnLive, I bought into the ecosystem for the few months it was relevant, and found a really fun fan forum that to this day exemplifies my platonic ideal of the message board. It was just a bunch of fans coming together to talk about the thing they loved. I also hung out on the Minecraft forum for a while. That one’s still up but I don’t think it’s very active now surprisingly given the enduring popularity of the game.
For now I mostly hang out on a couple conlanging/worldbuilding forums using phpBB.
Those still exist. You just have the wrong address.
obligatory RIP kongregate
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.
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.
That’s an unfortunate consequence of being a smaller community with fewer hosting resources. The older a forum is, the bigger the backend database hosting all those posts, and the more it will chug running queries.
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.
Yeah, I dare anyone to try digging through this thread and still claim afterwards that it’s better than branched comments.
Except vote systems are abused to hell. Dissenting opinions are down voted into oblivion and we end up with the echo chamber.
I spent a lot of time on the ebaumsworld forums in the early 2000s, and it was your classic shitshow. Not a huge amount of traffic, though, so you could have conversations, but you’d leave, and come back the next day, and sometimes you’d have pages of nonsense to read through.
Then, they introduced rep, and it was such a shitshow. Users conspired together to abuse it, because that’s how it goes, except now, instead of late night Skype sessions, it’s bots, and marketing, and PR.
I guess the problem was and always is, when there’s too many people, it ruins things.
Exactly, threads that get new activity should be bumped. Maybe they don’t need to be super-visible for people who ignored the thread in the first place, but they could at least go to the top-50 posts.
I think it would be cool if conversations that link to the same URL are all automatically grouped, so that reposts just become bumps with a new context/title.
You can sort posts on Lemmy by “latest comment” which mirrors the bumping method of forums. That’s how I do it. My complaint was that people always use the default so the community never grows around the style facilitated by the older forum method. Maybe if individual communities could force a default or at least have a community specific default that could be changed per user that would help.
Cool! Community-specific defaults is actually not a bad idea.
Visit cyberspace.online
I actually do really like that one. Has a cyber cafe exploring the forums vibe
