Are Internet boards and Forums dead

Submitted ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨saltynuts420@lemm.ee⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

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 if so mention some of them so that people like me can relive those days

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BudFactory@feddit.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Discord is pretty much the worst thing that happened to readily available information on the internet (when it comes to games and tech in general at least). No, I don’t wanna join your very specific niche server and use a search function worse than any forum back in the days had in hope to find the information I want.

Also Google got way worse, but that‘s no secret.

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- watson387@sopuli.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I agree. I don’t use Discord at all. Chat rooms always suck for questions/support.
  
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  - BudFactory@feddit.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That‘s not even all. The process now is something like:
    
    Search on Google: no answer -> search on Google with Reddit.com appended: no answer -> search on Google with Reddit and Discord Server appended: click through 3 expired invitation links -> finally find a working one: scroll through pages and pages of memes and rule34 content to find the answer you wanted
    
    I want my searchable forums and bulletin boards back ffs.
    
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- HipHoboHarold@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I love Discord for gaming with friends. I don’t mind some programs using it for releasing things. Like I play Session(skateboarding sim) a decent amount. It’s usually used for people throwing up custom maps and mods.
  
  But anytime people talk about going to a discord to really discuss things and keep up with them, I’m just gonna move on.
  
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- ikidd@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Discord is like using SMS to run something like Stack Overflow. When subreddits were moving off Reddit (which is good), some were talking about moving to Discord and I could not understand why anyone would think that was a comparable migration option.
  
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- TimoBRL@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Two months ago I started using Kagi as a Google alternative. It’s amazing how much of a difference it makes not having to wade through a list of sponsored links first and actually getting the results I want.
  
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  - qaz@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    $10 a month seems a lot for a search engine, but maybe it’s just because I’ve gotten used to all of them being free.
    
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  - shortwavesurfer@monero.town ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I am on kagi’s free trial right now actually. Honestly i thought i searched more than i have so far. I have been on the 100 search trial for like 3-4 days now and have only used like 11 or 12 searches. I never paid attention to how much i searched before. The great thing is that they accept crypto now.
    
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- cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Bing might actually be better than Google. Scary stuff
  
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FartsWithAnAccent@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Aren’t we like, on a forum right now?

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- MargotRobbie@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I would even argue that Lemmy is more of a return to traditional forums from reddit due to the independent nature of each instance.
  
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  - Venomnik0@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I wouldn’t say its a return of traditional forums. Far from it really design wise. I think its more of a return to independence and decentralization. I think we’re done with the whole “Web 2.0. Everything in one convenient place” and want to back to an era where things were much harder to find and communities were a lot more separated and dedicated to their own spaces. The fediverse isn’t the end all be all and we’re gonna suddenly go back to the 90s but to me, it’s an honest step in the right direction that could really change the internet for the better.
    
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- GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yeah. Lemmy and Reddit are basically mega-forums. The voting and threading systems went a huge way toward solving the problems that made traditional forums unworkable at large scale. e.g. there were always 8 pages of replies to trudge through to find one relevant answer. (XDA is a great modern example of this problem. Woe to those who find an XDA thread while troubleshooting.)
  
  It was also so, so much easier for someone to make a subreddit than host and maintain their own phpBB server. I am speaking from experience on both ends, there.
  
  Reddit killed the traditional forum, and you know what? Good. It was time.
  
  The same problem makes large Discord painful to use.
  
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- _pete_@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  the more traditional style of forums are still around too.
  
  They’re very rare these days though. It’s a whole lot easier to keep all your interests in one place rather than heading off to one forum for gaming chat and another for programming chat and another for gardening chat.
  
  Keeping it all in a single feed means your interest can be piqued at random times and you’ll be more likely to interact.
  
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Hubi@feddit.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Just to give another perspective, the German part of the internet is still full of extremely niche bulletin board-style forums for every hobby/technology imaginable. Many have millions of posts and have been online for 20+ years. Seems to me like it’s mostly the English-speaking web that’s been affected by these large content aggregators and closed platforms like Discord.

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- EyesEyesBaby@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I have noticed that when I search for some specific topics, German websites tend to come up more often. Be it IT or cars, German message boards are well represented (and luckily I can read most of it).
  
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- Sooperstition@lemmy.one ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Would that be why there seems to be so much Deutschposting on platforms like Mastodon and Lemmy?
  
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  - Hubi@feddit.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That could very well be. The instances are privately run, have small and personal communities and are often tech-focused so they meet pretty much all the criteria to be popular with Germans lol
    
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- sirboozebum@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I wish I could read/write German.
  
  I prefer the old forums.
  
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anlumo@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Isn’t lemmy basically that, but with modern technology? PHPBB was a nightmare for a sysadmin.

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- frezik@midwest.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Not quite there yet, but I think Lemmy has the potential to be the best of both. Something you could host without a major company involved, but also attached to a wider community. It isn’t getting the critical mass just yet.
  
  Also, yeah, like a lot of PHP apps at the time, phpBB had some boneheaded decisions. Like “plugins” that didn’t use any kind of API hooks, and instead relied on patching the code directly.
  
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  - anlumo@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Lemmy would have to fix federation first, until then it’s just modern forum software.
    
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  - saltynuts420@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    something is needed to be done to bring lemmy to the wider audience else this will also become one of those niche forum sites with the same 1 or 2k people
    
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- Swarfega@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  What was/is wrong with PhpBB?
  
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  - odbol@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It’s right there in the name: PHP
    
    Seriously though maintaining a PHP server is a security nightmare and you have to be constantly updating if you don’t want to be hacked. Just not worth it when there’s better options out there
    
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  - anlumo@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The software was so bad that if you didn’t keep up with emergency security fixes for even a week, the forum would instantly be taken over by someone. Being hacked was the natural state of that software.
    
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- saltynuts420@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  not organised well tho
  
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  - anlumo@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    These forums never were well organized.
    
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scarabic@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- skulblaka@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - Nilz@sopuli.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - scarabic@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yeah Tapatalk tried to do that for VBulletin but the problem is that little vBulletin sites don’t have very deep pockets to delve. Little forum sites are supported by small time revenue like network ads, and limited brand sponsorships and the occasional member donation. There isn’t a lot of money in this scene as a whole, so there is relatively little innovation. In a way that’s fine. The last thing forums want is mass participation.
    
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  - redcalcium@lemmy.institute ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Unfortunately those kind of apps would trip cloudflare’s bot protection feature, which is used by a lot of independent forum operators.
    
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- ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  You’re either incredibly centralised on a platform you don’t control, or incredibly fragmented between different smaller groups.
  
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pinkfootedgoose@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
People hosted their own forums as there was no viable alternative, and you didn’t care about legal liabilities, data governance, right to be forgotten, DDoS protection etc.

Most people (not all) will choose the easy option of an existing service. Of which the value for that service is to lock you in and spend all your time there.

Saying that I’m still active on multiple forums, but they’ve been around for years, and it’s definitely an older nerdier demographic.

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paddirn@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Dead Internet Theory for all the bots out there reading this.

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- greenskye@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Not sure I believe this has already happened, but I certainly believe we’re headed in that direction
  
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- galaxi@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Never heard of this before but it’s fascinating. I think I found my next religion.
  
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- scarabic@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  All of those things do happen but to say they’re the only thing happening…
  
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ScoobyDoo27@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Vehicle related forums are very much alive. It’s the best place you can go to get help with your car. I hang around on a couple different ones and it’s far better than anything I’ve seen on Reddit.

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- Nastybutler@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yep. Whenever I get a new vehicle or motorcycle, I always search for a forum for it and get way more info on common problems (and usually great ways to deal with them), hacks for the software, cool mods and accessories (usually ending up costing me thousands of dollars in parts I wouldn’t have known I “needed” if I stayed away, but…) tips and tricks for maintenance, and lots of useful info in general
  
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- theodewere@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  just want to fully second this based on experience.. information i got from forums really helped me with my most recent purchase.. both with making the decision in the first place, and with finding aftermarket parts that my specific run of that model really needed.. helped a ton..
  
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AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
When I started, you’d go to the relevant usenet group and typically found worldwide experts in whatever.

Alas, times change.

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MusketeerX@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Yes, they are less prevalent due to Reddit and other social media sucking up a lot of the users.

They are still around though. One Australian forum that I’ve been on for years which is still very active is Whirlpool. Started as a tech forum and expanded. It’s very useful as source of info as it’s been around over 20 years and a lot of questions have been asked and answered there.

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Chickenstalker@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I main 4chan. It is alive and kicking, as far a garbage bin full of maggots is alive and kicking.

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- Venomnik0@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  There are the alternatives too!
  
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radau@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Yep and reddit is slowly closing themselves off, I wouldn’t doubt you eventually have to be logged in to even view anything.

Forums are still around but it’s usually just the older established ones (I’m on stangnet.com and corral.net regularly but they’re car related so lots of technical info). Everything new either went Reddit or Discord it feels like and I’ll never install Discord.

I think Jellyfin started a forum post reddit but I haven’t gone looking yet for that one.

Information is absolutely getting harder to find online and if archive.org goes down we’re really screwed

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solstice@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Holy cow late 2000s…man it’s too bad you missed the 90’s. There were TONS of forums and real communities built around hobbies, interests, fandoms, etc. I really really miss them. I had real actual friends online. I blame facebook reddit et al for their demise. These huge websites are like the wal marts of the internet destroying small communities.

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dutchkimble@lemy.lol ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
XDA is pretty active

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- dandu3@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Niche phone ROMs are always found on telegram and it’s really annoying. I don’t want to use telegram. Especially since if I’m on XDA looking for ROMs it’s because my phone is fucked and telegram requires a phone to set up and login
  
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  - Duamerthrax@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It’s mind boggling that any privacy focused community uses Telegram.
    
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randint@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I too hate how much information is on discord now.

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- saltynuts420@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  mostly chats tho
  
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RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Forums still exist. They’re just buried in search results behind SEO garbage sites and video clips because ad revenue. I really despise the direction revenue has pushed the internet…I mean, I get it, sites cost money and people want to make money, I’m getting this stuff for “free”, but the monetization has absolutely destroyed the quality and availability of many things. The brief and concise informative text post has been buried in favor of lengthy videos filled with pointless blather and 5 minutes of actual content because length = ad space, and ad space gets pushed to the top.

That said, some bash places like reddit…but honestly reddit is a forum despite the social media moniker. It’s forums condensed under one roof. No, it’s not as easily searched…but forum searches have generally sucked since the beginning.

They’re out there. Searching [thing im looking for information about]+[forum] will often get you what you want, if it exists.

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galaxi@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I was just thinking about this the other day. It’s weird how Google has become so unusable due to its own practices that it seems to be giving up on being a search engine. I’ve been getting spam pop-ups lately on mobile search asking me to use AI. Of course people will wanna use it, they can’t find their answers normally anymore. You search for something and it’ll show you something completely unrelated because it’s trying to be “helpful” and corral you towards buying shit, and it doesn’t even do a good job at that. Heaven forbid you start to look past the first 3 pages… I don’t have a clue how these websites in the search results are maintained when they’re filled solely with spam and nonsensical gibberish. I’m totally with you. We used to actually see communities around and now it seems like they’ve fallen into the dark web, unfindable except by means of knowing someone who knows someone or, frustratingly, reddit. Paradoxically, it’s like the random AI-generated hash from the dark web is now here clogging up the tubes. I feel like everyone else came along and started dumping trash everywhere because we didn’t put up any signs or make any rules not to litter.

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Pretzilla@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
BTW, search term is ‘site:reddit.com’ not ‘site.reddit.com’

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- saltynuts420@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  yes typing error
  
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sturmblast@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It’s more that search engines kind of suck now.

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njm1314@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Am I not on one right now?

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RanchOnPancakes@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Reddit killed forums and Discord took over some of their other functions even though is fucking terrible at it.

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- squiblet@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Facebook also played a large role in retiring the independent old style of phpbb/vbulletin type forums.
  
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Adderbox76@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I actually really miss the old IMDB forums from before Amazon bought the site and killed them. I love film, and it was great to have specific forums for every movie or actor.

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- OfficerBribe@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  There probably are several, but I remember finding moviechat.org as a good alternative. Old threads have also been archived there.
  
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- emptyother@programming.dev ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It was. Until it became very damn toxic. Just as bad as Steam boards are today. Did it become too popular for its own good? Did the good moderators give up? Or is it just me that are too sensitive, and are unable to be as aggressive as is trendy?
  
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Harryd91@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Not dead but definitely on life support. I really do miss old forums. Reddit / Discord / Fediverse don’t come close to the old community feel. Facebook groups aren’t so bad sometimes for that but then the content is organised terribly. Say what you will about forum search engines but I could always rely on being able to enter a keyword or two and get what I was looking for.

A lot of forums I frequented were actually pretty well organised with subforums. It just isn’t the same these days.

Also web forums were the absolute best for petty drama. I do miss that in a weird way. Always that one angry gatekeeper flaming everyone.

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pewgar_seemsimandroid@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
not fully

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QuarterSwede@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
They’re definitely still around. A lot of vehicles have specific forums that are very active.

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Amphobet@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Gaia Online is still alive, believe it or not.

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- Caesium@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  the more niche avatar forums haven’t survived though. I miss them a lot :(
  
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rikonium@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It’ll vary, there’s a lot of forums out there from the car-model-specific (Piloteers) to makes (Kia-Forums) to more general ones like Bob is the Oil Guy. But there’s a lot of tech ones with cobwebs all over (Windows Central) and many that have disappeared entirely. (1src, webOS Nation/Precentral)

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virtualbriefcase@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m pretty sure Google (and potentially other search engines) de-prioritized blogs and forums. There’s plentry of both out there, although less than there were originally, they’re just being cut out of some search results

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TheGiantKorean@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I was on several fitness forums back in the 00s. I think some are still around, but largely abandoned. Facebook groups, Reddit, and Discord all seem to have killed them off.

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schmidtster@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Weird, I’ve never had issues of Reddit posts not being included in the top five results.

It’s actually the opposite issue. I’m finding in need to remove Reddit to get any meaningful results sometimes.

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- merde@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  -reddit indeed
  
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