I see a lot of people saying online that “forums are dying off because of discord and reddit”
yet other people reply: “Well, I’m still using my forum/IRC.”
So I have to ask, what forums that are decently big still exist? Only one I can think of is Nomutantsallowed for fallout related content.
I know this won’t interest most lemmy users, but the forums for most large american colligate sports programs are alive and well.
www.knockout.chat
I love how Whirlpool has stuck to it’s guns with regards to staying text only.
It survived a world of phpbb, avatars, and animated GIFS and is now surviving a world of social media and “engagement”. It’s like Usenet with moderation and no binaries.
Helps that it’s fast as blazes too.
- https://budgetlightforum.com/ flashlights et cetera
- so many automotive forums
- https://eevblog.com/forum electronics engineering
- https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/ audio, lots of diy
- https://www.finishing.com/ - metal anodising/plating/finishing. This incredible forum has been running since before the internet, originally a BBS.
- https://www.automaticwasher.org/ washing machines and dishwashers
- https://elektrotanya.com/ electronics repair
Car forums are still somewhat active. There’s usually one per car make or chassis. For example I use zilvia.net for S chassis stuff and miata.net for Miata stuff which are both active.
Gbatemp is one.
Does anyone remember Megalinks on Reddit? They started a forum after it was shut down, I was lucky enough to get invited before they closed registration. The forums are still very active and it’s the best community I’ve experienced online. I spend as much time there as I do here.
There are so many niche forums.
Here’s one I found a while ago when I was looking at repairing an old electric fan I found: Antique Fan Collector’s Forum.
In the way that people would always add “reddit” to their searches, try just adding “forum”.
Usually something hyper specific. This was a few years ago but I found a very bustling community forum for appliance repair. I posted a question on how to fix my oven and got very detailed answers and technical info involving the circuit board and heating element and troubleshooting steps. Unfortunately the general consensus on there is that for a lot of appliances, the board needs replaced which may or may not be available, and if it is, costs damn near what a new appliance does. Which is obviously done on purpose to drive sales.
The other one I know is my friend will participate on one for modding Toyota Yaris cars.
Bodybuilding / fitness forums are still pretty active.
All of these tend to have subreddit or Lemmy equivalents however.
https://tildes.net/ is still quite active and while the interface is similar to old reddit the focus is more on discussions than sharing links.
There are some good Matrix community, on matrix.org as well as individually run homeservers (federated).
matrix isn’t a forum. it’s a chat.
Incorrect. Technically Matrix is a protocol, and a forum client can be made. You already have some PoC social media ones. It just so happens that most well known clients at this time and for instant messaging. But it can be much more.
Isn’t Reddit or Lemmy pretty much just a structured forum?
(early) reddit was the answer to the question “what if anyone could have their own phpbb instance without having to host it?” Then along came Lemmy asking “what if anyone could have their own reddit instance and have to host it?”
lol!
Larger open-source projects tend to have forums. Here’s a few off the top of my head:
Openstreetmap also has some forums. The main one being community.openstreetmap.org
