I have been online since the early '90s, and used to be extremely active on many different forums. I even ran a fairly large forum on my own website, using Simple Machines Forums- which, to my surprise, still exists- from 2005-2008 or so.
I can’t say I have a favourite- I really liked SMF back in the day but I have no idea what it looks like now. I really can say that I really miss the pre-Facebook Internet when there were loads of extremely active forums in every imaginable topic, and people found them and used them instead of just creating a Facebook group and pretending that everyone will just use that by default (I refuse to use Facebook for anything).
I don’t think of Reddit and Lemmy as forums, really, not in the old-school sense. Reddit was a poor substitute, as for many years more weight was put on links than on self-posts, and in the old-school forums I’m thinking of, things like upvotes and “likes” didn’t become a thing until they were used on Reddit and Facebook, and I honestly don’t think having those features makes the Internet better.
I ran my own phpBB for myself and friends in high school. It wasn’t used much, but I mostly did it to just learn PHP which was growing in popularity at the time over HTML.
If we’re talking about reddit-likes/alternatives, I’ve tried Imzy (gone sadly), Voat (briefly, and gone thank goodness), and Tildes. Tildes I’m still on.
I lurk Hacker News and Ars Technica’s forums. I did sign up for a forum earlier in the year called ResetEra, which is focused on gaming. Still mostly lurk it.
I used Voat back in the day, from the beginning, when it was still called Whoaverse; to right around when it became a Nazi-filled shithole. But that doesn’t really count too much since for a good portion of that time, it ran on a modified version of the old open-source reddit code. Whatever it moved to in the short time before the new ““community”” ruined was pretty decent; lemmy-ui reminds me of it a lot actually.
I used to be big into Imzy too, before it shutdown. Its software was somewhat like new Reddit, but like, actually performant and not a bug-riddled mess. I still miss it, but the lemmyverse, especially Beehaw, is filling that hole.
I’ve also used the old guard of forum software, I don’t know what ran what because I didn’t really pay attention to that kind of stuff as a kid.
I’m a dinosaur so I fondly remember slashdot and the old “scoop” sites. I like information density too.
I think kbin is written in php which is interesting. I like the “feel” of it the best. But I get the impression it has even fewer mod tools than lemmy.
I doubt anyone knows about it, but I really like the design of WoltLab Burning Board 3.
I feel like the visual layouts of forums (like the one I mentioned) lend themselves to better social interaction between users and let them get to know each other more easily. On here, I often see posts from the same people across communities, but it only becomes apparent to me after some time because the design is very minimalist (there’s really just a name over the comment), whereas in forums everyone creates their own profile picture and text and a signature; that makes everything more personal, I think. I can appreciate both though.
Back in the “good ol’ days”, I’ve used several awesome forum software such as phpBB, vBulletin, Invision Power Board, Simple Machines Forum etc. I personally liked Invision the most, it seemed super polished and had a good set of features. phpBB was also nice but lacked features, and vBulletin felt a bit clunky to me.
I’ve been wondering about different forum softwares recently as well.
The Lemmy software seems like it might not be developed enough for the size of the userbase. This feels to be the case even more so after the attacks on Lemmy.world which would’ve been less of a problem with better moderation tools.
I’ve heard people throwing around the idea of forking Lemmy, but I’m not sure how likely that is.
I haven’t used a non-link-aggregator forum in a long time, so I might be biased; but I don’t personally like the style of them. I prefer the information density of Lemmy/ Reddit/ Tildes style link-aggregator forums. The ability to have multiple independent comment threads for each link definitely helps encourage discussions (in my opinion).
My personal preference would be for Lemmy to develop stronger mod tools, but who knows how likely that would be?
I haven’t used a non-link-aggregator forum in a long time, so I might be biased; but I don’t personally like the style of them. I prefer the information density of Lemmy/ Reddit/ Tildes style link-aggregator forums. The ability to have multiple independent comment threads for each link definitely helps encourage discussions (in my opinion).
Lemmy/Reddit also allow “self posts” with no links, so technically they’re two-in-one.
One could create a community and treat it as a personal “blog”, write posts in there, and have the comment section be the comment section for the post.
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