Yes, what I mean is instead of having separate forums for everything, a Reddit/Lemmy type platform where people can create their own community to start threads. So if I wanted I could create a tractor community with sub communities for different brands and in there would be a single discussion to discuss a specific model, but my credentials would also allow me to go on the cooking community, in the baking sub community to take part in a discussion on strawberry shortcakes that's been going on for months...

Reddit type "forums" just lead to the same questions/content being posted again and again and if you know a lot about a subject and just happen to miss the one time someone asks a question about it then that discussion is lost to time.

Some things like federated identities, or even federated content would go a long way into making forums a thing again.

I still think lemmy could use a "community type" enum where you can say what kind of discussion you want there.

Not as if that was solved by instead having people tell OP to research the answer one of the many (now dead) discussions where the same question was asked!

That's a culture-thing. I'm a member of two forums that are still pretty active. One views dead thread revivals as amusing, the other almost literally has a celebration in-thread when it happens as all the members with older posts in it come piling in. Heck, the second forum has a thread so active that people literally ask for, and get, recaps for the last X amount of time for it.

Exactly, some people would complain about bringing back zombie threads, while others whine that people didn't use the search feature to find existing threads on the topic. You can't win either way with forum gatekeepers.

😱

Edit: And both instances don't work 🤣