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Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.
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Yeah, forums were pretty cool!
this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
1939 points (99.1% liked)
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The worst is Discord. It doesn't show up in search engines and somehow you have to know that is where you are "supposed" to go for help. Privacy issues aside, I am fine with discord for playing games with friends or big conventions/LAN parties, but I don't understand why anyone would use it as a forum.
Yep.
Discord is a black hole where information goes to die.
Its not indexable, its not searchable, If you are having a problem you will never find it via conventional means.
and the second the discord shuts down, all the information is gone forever.
Discord is not a tech support platform. it is not a information storage platform.
it is a communication platform.
and far, far to many organizations use it for tech support and information storage. To the detriment of everyone... even themselves.
Because people don't want to have to join special services just to find out why their piece of software doesnt work.
Oh thank the gods. I was worried I didn't grasp some basic modern internet concept, because I couldn't understand why people misuse Discord as a forum. Thanks to this thread i feel vindicated.
why anyone would use it as a forum
That's what I also would like to know. It's such a bad platform for it.
Discord is a great platform for bullshitting with your friends while playing games and shit.
but people are using it for things that its not, and wasnt ever meant to be.
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It’s because they are blocking off their communities through paywalls or a means to feed them advertising. Everyone is an idiot for using discord for support. Imagine being a company and thinking answering the same stupid questions 100x a day instead of having a damn FAQ on a website is efficient and makes sense. Lost their damned minds. I’ll die on the hill that discord is stupid to use for anything but gaming and casual conversations and the people funneling their fan base or userbase to discord are assholes.
I literally went and asked a question and someone responded "?faq" and a bot responded with the FAQs. Mind blowing. They could've just posted it on their GitHub page. This was for a Minecraft mod.
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I'm getting two points from the article. One is addressed handily by the Fediverse, the other is not.
First the centralized (I prefer to say "urbanized") nature of social media means a handful of companies control all the conversations. The Fediverse is a decent (though not perfect) solution to that problem, and I think everyone on here knows that.
However, the article also talks about the problems with the format of social media, not just who's hosting the platform. On traditional forums, conversations can last for years, but on Reddit, Discord, etc. new topics quickly bury old ones, no matter how lively those old topics are. Sure, you can choose to sort by "last comment" which replicates the traditional forum presentation with topic bumping, but it's not the default, even on Lemmy, so 90% of people won't bother.
I get to know people on traditional forums, even miss them if they leave, but on Reddit, comments are just disembodied thoughts manifesting in the ether. That may be due to the size of the community rather than the format, though.
Yeah, those old forum threads really were great. Many forums had threads that were discussing topics for years, all in one place. There were people posting how they were building something and they would just reply to their thread with an update. It's a great way to collect information and better than we are doing it here
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You should be using Lemmy instead of Reddit. It's defederated, and it's spread out over 600 Instances in many different countries. This way, one rich egomaniac can't ruin it for everyone else.
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Funny thing...an internet forum group from 23 years ago is slowly reforming because everyone is sick of the same thing re:socmed
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There are tons of forums out there, the search engines just won't show them to you. The search engines are the real problem.
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I hate Discord.
The interface is clunky.
They always try to sell you useless (at least for me) options.
What with the users posting so many gifs?
“Now”? Try 10 years ago, at the very least.
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
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Make Lemmy great again!
plenty of pointed discourse forums out there. I agree that the search engines may be the problem. You have to know where to look.
No, enshittified search engines are only catalogging those because they're in the AI bed with them.
Your Favorite Forum still rules.
Maybe Lemmy is a 2020s version of phpBB (the forum software, which is open source like Lemmy is). Lemmy and phpBB can both be hosted by anyone, but of course the interesting thing about Lemmy is that Lemmy servers can share their content with each other.
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How do we create more forums?
Lemmy communities are basically forums. So let's post and interact more here. :)
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I actually just launched a PHPBB forum for specific interests in regards to the indie web, building websites, and sharing random banter (among a few other things). I find Reddit and Lemmy to be useful for seeing what's going on in the world overall, and Discord has mostly just been annoying ever since its launch, and forums seem like a good answer to recreating actual communities. And if there are more people who feel this way, maybe they'll make a comeback (because they definitely haven't just started to be affected by corporations attempting to centralize everyone to one thing).
Do you have a link to your forum? Edit: nvm I just found it linked on your website :}
Haha sorry, would have responded earlier but am stuck at work
Internet forums will come back when AI overtakes Reddit and Discord goes awry because they go public.
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Here is a chrome extension that copies all messeges and media from a discord server you're a part of.
In case the stuff on a server is what keeps you coming back.
I’m looking for a study group for a specific maths textbook I’m reading
Discord math forum is too big and my queries get swamped so I don’t use it
I’d appreciate some advice on this and also how to develop my federated use of the internet
Maybe !math@lemmy.world ?
Cheers I’ll check it out and revert back
Edit: does an app like lemmy have the foundation to host something like a “specific math textbook forum” where subsections are dedicated to individual textbooks?
Not right now, unfortunately. But it looks like tags like on Reddit are planned in the future. Right now I'd just create a post with the specific question. There are helpful people, for sure. :)
On one hand I want to foster discussion so I don’t mind older posts being buried.
However it would be good to have the space organised by text books perhaps, but this may eventually get stale
I was thinking tags would be useful but i don’t know effective it would be to have #ArbitraryBook #ChapterOne #Question13 as tags to search for? Would it even work?
No perfect solution for this currently, unfortunately.
But let the information flow. Create a post and look for feedback if people would be interested in a specific community on the topic of the textbook. There are a lot of scientists here, so there is surely a space for your topic.
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Decentralized and smaller platforms definitely help preserve open discussion. But when it comes to company security culture and internal comms, even forums are giving way to automation. Tools like cyberupgrade.net show how even training and risk detection are now handled without Slack threads or forum debates.
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