Met my wife on a little internet forum called 9chat. Right before it disappeared.

These little spaces on the internet were quite nice to be. Always seeing the same people. It has a different feeling.

Decentralising social media will have its positives. When one tries to control public opinion, people can flee to another one for example.

most of them, but alot of them for niche subjects are still there. theres one i go to where people were banned from reddit (tons of accounts used for linking, OF and advert) basiclaly they are reporting thier experiences the same way here as right there. medical forums is still alive though, as are "joining the military"ones.

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

Was this article written 15 years ago? Because this is anything but a new occurrence.

How do we create more forums?

Then my so called "friend" calls me a manbaby for freaking out about this. They are going to be policing the entire internet soon!

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

Your Favorite Forum still rules.

Internet forums will come back when AI overtakes Reddit and Discord goes awry because they go public.

Especially considering reddit is publicly traded and discord is having an IPO soon, and reddit has gone full 1984 censorship.

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.

My first real social experience on the internet was on php forums. There are still such forums around and I am still part of a few.

The Reddit style voting/threading is superior of forums though.

An unfederated Lemmy instance for example would actually be really good.

That not all, search engine too are killing internet. They become worst ad time pass. You can't even found again some piece of info which is still here on a forum or something. Google prefer to send you to a reddit which doesn't answer you question than on a forum which has the specific answer and that you found some years ago. It fell like search engine are purposely killing old plateforme even if they are still up.

I STRONGLY recommend just going out looking for whatever forums you can find that are still active.

I've actually been going out of my way to look up new forums to use since the Reddit API controversy. Finding them can sometimes be a pain in the ass because search engines suck nowadays, but I've found a few I hang around on. I spend way more time on them than I do Lemmy.