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Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.
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this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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What do you think Lemmy is missing that phpBB had aside from strong user communities built over years where many of the users knew each other IRL?
Being designed around persistent topics rather than the ephemeral post model and more visible user customisation (more prominent avatars, signatures, that sort of thing).
Hmmm, you're probably on to something there. I think Lemmy could do that but no one cares to set it up.
I'm honestly not sure this is a bad thing. Dear God, remember how threads would get blown out by hyper-configurations? Sig blocks that were 20,000 pixels long and endless GIF spam? Not sure I'm in a hurry to get back to that!
One of my favorite forums has been around since 1999 and is currently running on XenoForo which is very phpBB-esque. Anytime I get a nostalgia hankering I drop in for a few minutes. It's not always as good as you may remember. :)
Honestly, no, none of the forums I ever used allowed that sort of things for, well, for obvious reasons!
Anyway, my reasoning for this is to help make it easier to mentally anchor a given interaction to a user. On things like Lemmy and Reddit I feel like it's a constant sea of random usernames - there's no persistence or community. I could well have spoken to the same person multiple times but I don't notice because they're so anonymous.
That's it right there, that's what you are missing. The older forum communities were small enough that you could keep track of whose who, something that isn't possible when the user counts are in the tens of thousands to tens of millions. I think a lot of us olds would like to go back to that but its impossible; our monkey brains can't handle communities of that size.
I feel a fundamental problem is the ephemeral post model. If one isn't actively contributing frequently it's effectively the same as not being part of the community at all.
Seeing lots of familiar faces in threads, even if they didn't post today, helped.
With regards to your point though, I think it's one of the reasons I'm not fussed about getting "everyone" onto a single platform. It's too many people!
Just looked it up. $60/mo is the "starter" price!? Are forums normally so expensive to run?
XenoForo is a bit spendy but they're providing the software, hosting and data storage. IIRC the forum I'm talking about is on the "Business" plan due to how busy it is.