I was active on an “Old Web Revival” forum for a while last year. I was expecting it to be populated by nostalgic gen x and millennials, but it turned out to mostly be zoomers romanticizing the '90s and thinking they could save the internet with Neocities.
After realizing I was the oldest person there I felt like a bumbling grandpa telling meandering stories of the way it used to was, so I eventually left. I haven’t been able to find another retro nostalgia forum since then.
That’s the one. I felt bad leaving without a word but it was spur of the moment. I just got the sudden realization like I was a teenager still hanging out in the McDonalds Play Place and quietly noped out the door.
Not that I have anything against gen z. I just couldn’t relate to most of what they were saying. So I guess a better analogy is that I was like an old man wandering around the mall surrounded by teenagers. Except malls are dead now so gen z still won’t relate. Hence: bumbling grandpa.
I also joined the RetroDaze forum before that but there were only two or three other active users and I got the impression at least one of them was an “I voted for Trump” type of guy.
I do get that. I like the place for the discussion as answers seem to be lengthy and generally well thought out, but I do get the impression there’s a lot of zoomers there. I just like the idea of a personal site and have found a lot of useful info and ideas there, but yeah totally understand where you’re coming from.
For a bit now I’ve been thinking of starting a small classic style of forum, using the top forum software (to my knowledge at least — xenForo) and writing a custom extension for it to add ActivityPub to it
Idk, I’ve realized that I don’t have a whole lot of time to keep up with live chat communities (like Discord, etc) so I started throwing the forum idea around
After ditching Reddit I found most of the car centric subreddit content was just coming from forums that survived because car people were inherently old school, even for EVs. So if you want to know the latest about EV trucks there’s forums for Rivian, Cybertruck, and Lightning. The trouble is that they are all very tribal, so getting unbiased info seems harder. I’m also a fan of older jeeps and they are full of problems, but almost all of them have answers on these forums from the early 2000s with links to geocities pages. Hopefully someone detailed the answer and only linked for supporting details.
The cs.rin.ru forum needs more love. The people there are awesome at helping out the worldwide community get easy access to things. Great place overall.
Rate Your Music and MusicBrainz both use traditional forums, though I haven’t really posted in them lately. I also joined EndeavourOS’ forums at the time I joined Lemmy.
Any good Linux distro worth their salt has their own version of this. Other platforms just don’t cut it when you need support or have a question specific to your distro specific needs.
Interesting forums like The Indie Stone have caught my eye as being active for the very niche topic of talking specifically about the Project Zomboid video game, so there is that.
Forums aren’t completely dead, but, sadly, they are starting to go the way of the email mailing lists and irc channels. Still alive…but barely so.
I can’t say I really use any of the older style BBS ones like phpBB but there are plenty of smaller software communities using Discourse based forums. For less active communities they are far superior to Discord due to the more asynchronous nature and gives you a lot more control than Reddit/Lemmy.
This one. I don't like the other things you mention. I did join a sub reddit on the topic years ago, but it was awful. Full of people who didn't know anything of the subject, but were very willing to downvote.
Add comment