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.
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.