Agreed! I moved to HN and SO after two forums slowly died. I have some friends from those forums, but a chat group is different from a forum with dozens or sometimes hundreds of active topics every day. Not just in activity, but also the kind of things you can talk about.

I'm not quite sure what is going to fill this gap. I don't always have a place to post things. Blogging doesn't exactly work without an audience. The mainstream things these days appear to be just chats. There are still forums, mailing lists... heck, there are BBSes but it's niche and hard to find anything that isn't already on the decline.