i started using the internet in the late 2000’s and still remember when you search for something most of the times it would return with a forum post … now its just random websites … if you ever need real and concise answer you have to add site.reddit.com at every search and since discord or twitter nor crawlable by these search crawlers they are not mentioned . Where did all those forums went…are there still active forums ?
There are still plenty of active forums. Some of the old forum platforms didn’t make the shift to mobile very gracefully, and most of them have failed to put out good apps. So there are casualties by the road of change to be sure.
Reddit is huge and became a platform for forums. A lot of groups are also stuck on Facebook. Sigh.
But there are probably more active forums than ever, because there’s just so much more of everything on the internet now. Posting online used to be such a niche nerd thing to do. Most wouldn’t think of it. Social media cracked that egg open. Your grandma posts to a Facebook group.
Of course, if your definition of forums is super specific to the early days, it’s a different picture. There may be fewer vBulletin 2.0 powered web forums than 10 years ago… but there also may not.
That’s a good point. A really good app that can parse a standard framework that a thousand independent forums can stand up for their own purposes (Say, MyBB for instance), would go a long way towards reviving the forum scene as a whole with a very Lemmy-like or reddit-like experience.
That app already exists and is called Tapatalk. I think almost every forum I’ve visited in the last decade has a banner on mobile that suggests using Tapatalk.
It’s not very good though it seems.
Unfortunately those kind of apps would trip cloudflare’s bot protection feature, which is used by a lot of independent forum operators.
You’re either incredibly centralised on a platform you don’t control, or incredibly fragmented between different smaller groups.