Is It Too Late To Save Discussion Forums?

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I was reading this article from [a website] that will not be named, since they used and credited Midjourney for images in their article, and we don’t do that. As people who care about artists and the work they do, we don’t generate sludge, and then also credit the theft machines that are making sludge for us, okay? But anyway, the article was about how we need to save discussion forums, and that Reddit and Discord are killing them (a conversation that feels ten years too late). But, is it too late to talk about this?

I’ve personally gone on tangents on here a few times already about how nostalgic I am for the era of the internet when people were less accessible, not always around, and the web was something you explored. How discussion forums were the main place you gathered to form communities, and that these places weren’t a thing with millions of people, but more like hundreds, and rarely, sometimes, thousands.

I’ve also talked about how one of my favorite forums to visit, the mirror of forums of yore, is Melonland (mostly for retro webdevs and community around that topic).

You might say, “What do you mean they’re dying? We have Discourse for modern forum software!”

But, I don’t like Discourse all that much. It doesn’t feel like a forum. It feels like … I don’t know. Something else, entirely.

It feels like modern webdevs who are constantly trying to modernize every single web system that has ever existed, as if something was wrong with the way things were once presented to us, online. There was nothing wrong with PHPBB. We don’t need forums that look like a Slack meeting.

Just like there was nothing wrong with AOL Instant Messenger. AOL totally could have continued developing it, with its current UI, to run much the same way Discord does. That would’ve been neat, huh?

But then Discord did come along, and with instant messaging, they brought servers, and with servers, they also brought channels that you can setup as some bastardized rip of what a forum is. Channels, that you can post to, and have slower discussion.

It does and still feels needless and also pointless.

But then you have Reddit, which has been a mainstay for … so many years. I think it was open to the public around … 2005? So, right around the time that Facebook started replacing MySpace, Reddit was replacing forums with one gigantic “frontpage of the internet” where millions would eventually gather to talk about any and all topics.

Essentially, erasing the need or drive to setup a discussion forum on your own domain, on your own server, for specific topics. Why do that, when you’ve got Reddit, where you can just create a community centered around whatever topic you’re interested in?

And that’s the overwhelming problem with the modern internet, and its many developers. We’re always trying to smash as many things as possible into one thing, under one roof.

Centralization is the anti-thesis of the internet. We shouldn’t put everything into one place, because, as you, the reader, have probably already seen, that doing so is catastrophic, when places like Twitter get bought out.

Not that I don’t like Reddit and its alternative federated clone, Lemmy, which, for all intents and purposes, does a better job at splitting up hosting and data shards. But … I do find myself asking, “Where have all the normal PHPBB forums gone?”

It’s an internet tragedy that the anime forum (that I link to via WayBackMachine at the bottom of the homepage) that I was on as a 16 year old has been dead for five years. Gone. Deleted. Never to be seen again. And, because of the way the WayBackMachine works, there’s no way to extract my old thoughts, my old posts … who I was when I was 16, and put it somewhere that won’t die and be erased.

Decentralization, though, people treat this like it’s a new idea, even though this is just how the internet worked back then. People did their own thing, there were websites for every topic, every interest, and a million discussion forums to cover those topics and interests. But, to save them?

Unfortunately, I don’t see a way through any of this where old-style, or discussion forums, in-general, will end up “saved.” I don’t see this happening in the present day, where “decentralization” is a buzzword corporations and crypto-bros use in order to garner interest in their next pump and dump.

While mass amounts of people are happy to continue posting on Twitter, or to move their posting to Threads under Meta, one of the largest and most evil central platforms in the world.

In my opinion, the average Joe doesn’t care about this stuff. You might care about it. I care about it. But what do two people matter, to a mass of millions who log onto the next central billionaire owned platform to post about the next foozeball game, and then log off, without a thought or care in the world? Even while said platforms are stripping them of their right to not be harassed or hate-crimed.

It’s almost like there’s this thing that’s been happening the past decade, like, some kind of … net split?

The net is splitting, between the hangers-on who know things can be better, and actively are trying to make them that way, and the people who just want to thought-dump, without a care for where they do it. Like a digital Great Wall, or Cyberpunk 2077’s Black Wall, I think there will be an underground web where people speak, communicate, and build for a more humane digital future, and then there’ll be the billion dollar platforms where people post shit like, “Who up? Gotta be on that grind bro, get that bread! $$$” and then log off.

Which, is a shame. Because it will be those people who ask the question, “Well, what do I do now?” When they lose their presence, data, and online identity the next time one of these billionaires has a mid-life crisis.

“But Nova, this is really pessimistic and uncharitable to most people!”

Yup, look what “most people” have done to the world.