lemmyBB exists which lets you view Lemmy as a forum. Seems like all the hosted versions of it are down though, and nutomic is too busy working on the backend to maintain it.

I wish we did, I think they went out of favour because most people prefer the "speed" of platforms like Reddit, where threads are active for a couple of hours and then something new comes up and a new conversation starts.

The problem is, there's no accumulation of knowledge, it's the same arguments and information getting repeated every time a new post is started on a similar subject.

You can't tell someone "Discussion is already happening on this subject in this thread, so we're deleting your post" when discussions don't get bumped to the top and discussions don't stay active once they're not on people's front page anymore.

The threaded replies don't help either, it's impossible to keep up with a post that gets a lot of attention since you can have hundreds if not thousands of branches spreading in all directions...

There's a good reason why specialized discussion platforms all use forums instead a Reddit style system, they want to build a knowledge database and they do, plenty of active threads that are over a decade old on many forums all over the internet!

Discourse added federation

Yeah I've been waiting for something like that.

Because as we learned in our lemmy growing pains, large-scale federation is a challenge that requires a fairly concerted effort and then doesn't always succeed very well.

People still (rightly) have tons of complaints about lemmy failing to do things as well as reddit did. It has some huge upsides (no center ownership) but it's a challenge. Now imagine the much-smaller userbase. I knew everyone in the topics I frequented back in my forum days because there were that few people.

And discussions that are dead after 24h max.

I take part in discussions that have been going on every day for 10 years + on forums.

They're still used by people that are actual experts at what they do. There's a reason why GBATemp, XDAforums, all kinds of car and games forums are still being used and are still very active.