tl;dr: Slack and Discord are free of charge, modern forum hosting is 50 USD per month. Forums might not be obsolete but the forum business is certainly tricky.
On the other hand, Slack has terrible pricing and Discord is apparently not profitable yet. So there's that too.
But I'd love to have beautiful, modern forum software with affordable hosting options and ease of self hosting.
Forums work. And the "real time" point isn't that bad: it's not instant messaging, but that I'd argue that's a good thing.
Witness the image processing forum, in existence for many years now: https://forum.image.sc/
The value of its cumulative knowledge is remarkable.
To further add: both Discord and Slack are companies. Their goals may or may not be aligned with those of any one community in need of an online discussion place. Whereas a forum put up for and maintained by a specific community stays focused given sensible moderation and anti-spam mechanisms.
@Daojoan It's absolutely and totally beyond my understanding how it happend that some software projects (possibly non-software projects too) use discord as documentation. I mean... wtf.
One of the things that constantly aggravates me, as a person who touches computers for a living, is that people who understand software the most from a technical viewpoint are also often those who understand software the least from a social viewpoint.
@Daojoan Ageee. Still finding useful info in old forums, which was posted 10+ years ago. But nothing for last few years, because it's burried in fb groups, discord etc.
@po3mah@Daojoan Yeah it really is unfortunate that a lot of the useful info out there is on siloed communities. Reddit is still there but I despise how the owners are treating the users
@Daojoan Couldn’t agree more! BeerAdvocate has had a forum since the late 90s. A lot has changed since then, and we’ve had our share of forum issues/platform migrations, but it remains the heart of our community today. I also hope to federate one day.
@Daojoan I love forums, and I really wish people would use them, but how do you get people to use them?
I have a couple of forums for a couple of video games, that used to be active before Discord happened, but even though they still exist (they never went anywhere!), people just stopped using them.
The people who made forums active - the "always online" people - are those who vastly prefer Discord for its real-time communication aspect, and as such, people just don't find things on forums.
@soop they're so much harder to manage and engage with. Communities become siloed by timezone. Information gets lost. Newcomers get easily overwhelmed.
Real time chat has a place. But communities need something more.
@Daojoan Technically both real time chat and forums are the same thing - there is a space for messages, someone can send a message in, other people see the message and whom it's from. The difference is in UX.
There probably is a way to combine the best sides of both realtime chat and forums then other than just making separate spaces with a shared account database.
@soop@Daojoan There are many reasons. The most important one, in my opinion, is that synchronous communication (chat, video, phone, etc.) locks the participants' available time in the conversation that has to happen at that moment. In an asynchronous conversation (forum, email, etc.), all participants will reply when possible. Everyone is free to manage their own time. Like what's happening here ☺️. There's also the forum, email, etc. much better content searchability and organization.
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