Fediverse

What can we do? What can we do about Meta and Xitter and Reddit? Just try to show people that there's another side where the grass actually is greener and invite them to join.

Everytime I want to look for modern solutions to newer projects online it's always in the damn discord. I have like 20 discords in folders just because I feel like I'll need them to troubleshoot eventually.

Forums are still alive in ultra niche communities. My favorites: Badger and Blade for wet shaving, Snuffhouse for snuff tobacco, Quantnet for quantitative finance. All of these gather way better content and users than their Reddit counterpart, which usually devolves into memes and pic of the day stuff

Something I was hopeful for but seems to have died is lemmyBB. A phpBB-style front-end to Lemmy. I'd like the accessibility of being able to use an existing account that federation brings but the forum-style approach that phpBB has.

Mostly though I've been disappointed in the teens and twenty-somethings. They seem to have, in distressingly large numbers, just opted to go along with whatever they're encouraged to use by large platform holders. There doesn't seem to be an appetite to create communities and define spaces that they control. Perhaps that's just me getting old though...

plenty of pointed discourse forums out there. I agree that the search engines may be the problem. You have to know where to look.

Met my wife on a little internet forum called 9chat. Right before it disappeared.

These little spaces on the internet were quite nice to be. Always seeing the same people. It has a different feeling.

Decentralising social media will have its positives. When one tries to control public opinion, people can flee to another one for example.

most of them, but alot of them for niche subjects are still there. theres one i go to where people were banned from reddit (tons of accounts used for linking, OF and advert) basiclaly they are reporting thier experiences the same way here as right there. medical forums is still alive though, as are "joining the military"ones.

FWIW it's very common now to see at least open source projects run their own Matrix channels instead of Discord/IRC/xxx.

(I see in other comments that there's some confusion regarding Element and Matrix. Element is a client, Matrix is the protocol. Yes, Element-the-company does their best to add to this confusion)

No, enshittified search engines are only catalogging those because they're in the AI bed with them.

Your Favorite Forum still rules.

Are you pretending that nothing has ever been tried? The Fediverse, that's what is being done about it. That's why most of us are here. Also, why narrow it down to Reddit and Discord? Articles like these are garbage because it's very tone deaf.

Likes and Upvotes have long, long existed before. They started on forums, it was just the dawning of MySpace and Facebook and Reddit are what popularized them and made it standard.

Fucking hell, Forums also still exist, they just aren't getting activity. I hate this fucking article now.

Was this article written 15 years ago? Because this is anything but a new occurrence.

Then my so called "friend" calls me a manbaby for freaking out about this. They are going to be policing the entire internet soon!

How do we create more forums?

My first real social experience on the internet was on php forums. There are still such forums around and I am still part of a few.

Internet forums will come back when AI overtakes Reddit and Discord goes awry because they go public.