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).

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

“Now”? Try 10 years ago, at the very least.

Funny thing…an internet forum group from 23 years ago is slowly reforming because everyone is sick of the same thing re:socmed

without forums or decentralized social services i wouldn’t have met my husband

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.

Let’s hope the resurrection of Digg starts to fill this void.

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.

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.

It’s why I went to the Chime.In app. It’s not perfect, but it’s not Reddit

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

Your Favorite Forum still rules.

Fuck Reddit, the great bastion of censorship

Every forum i joined for my hobbies are always been full of shills in disguise.

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

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