I think the infrastructure has rusted a bit. A while back I wanted to spin up a forum, and I wasn't super impressed. There's a mix of new projects that don't really get the forum thing (they're often very focused on businesses rather than communities), and old PHP projects which haven't advanced since the early 2000s.

This also goes for the infrastructure around forums - several turnkey sites I tried simply didn't work, and I ended up deploying one myself through a crufty Bluehost portal. Given that a lot of forum activity is driven by non-tech people, I'm not surprised they've started dying out. It's a shame, but the monoliths like FB have both the audience and the on-ramps.

Edit: as a side note, I eventually gave up because I couldn't get my target community to join the forum. Most people were already on a Facebook group and uninterested in switching.

This is because it's trivial to create a subreddit, which gives you just about everything a standalone forum could want except self-hosting.

>which gives you just about everything a standalone forum could want except self-hosting.

A lot of forums want to not be joined at the hip with a cesspool of transient internet riff-raff which is exactly the problem that platforms that try to cater to everything (reddit, 4Chan) have. It's impossible to have real quality discussion about anything when the people who have deep interest in the subject are outnumbered 100:1 by people with passing interest.

It's an interesting trade-off... toxic subreddits exist, and hitting the front page instantly creates an Eternal September. BUT Reddit also gives you a suite of moderation tools out of the box. You can set rules, and benefit from site-wide policies that keep you on the right side of the law most of the time.

It's not perfect, but it's good enough that it seems to have won the segment by a fairly large margin.

The moderation tools are pretty poor once you start needing to do anything more advanced than banning users.

Reddit is a waste of time because threads get locked after a couple of months. (Sometimes, proper netiquette REQUIRES necroposting.)

Reddit has one missing feature in particular that’s important for some number of online communities: being able to include images in a comment.

RES kinda sorta helps with that in old.reddit.

>and old PHP projects which haven't advanced since the early 2000s.

Hmm, I think things like phpBB or SMF are still alive.

I think the usage of advanced didn't merely mean alive, but changing and growing. A membership org I help with their IT needs has come to realize that the member email lists have become moribund, and so we've been discussing forums... but the look of a lot of older forum software has become fixed in time and turned people off -- Discourse caught more interest than anything else I showed them.

Oh, Discourse, probably most annoying forum software available thanks to its stupid scroll hijacking.

Wasn't there a startup about 10 or 15 years ago dedicated to building communities of communities. I think it was called Nine-something and was started by one of the early internet big shots...

I tried searching for this on Google but failed miserably.

ning.com?

I have a cousin that used to work there years ago when social media was still in its infancy. He was part of the initial wave of layoffs when they weren't able to get traction against Facebook.

He's doing well for himself now, Director of Engineering at a FAANGM company, but it did cause him to abandon the startup game.

Yes! That's it! Thank you. It was driving me nuts and I started to wonder if I imagined it.

Looking at it today, it's changed a lot in the past 15 years...