This is a very different problem than the current Reddit API pricing outrage though. The demographic of us who want a "big Internet forum" is small, probably too small to cater to as a social media company. We also tend to be highly opinionated which means it takes more effort from devs (aka $$$) to satisfy us ("I hate Electron I won't use that bloated POS", "Javascript is evil", "my browser should be my user agent", "my distro doesn't package the libraries that are needed to build this app".) I just don't think there's a site at scale willing to hold people like us.

As you say, Reddit has slowly been transforming into yet another social media site. Maybe federated protocols (ActivityPub like Lemmy/Mastodon, ATProto, etc) can win out. More and more of my topically focused conversations these days happen on Matrix and Discord. It's much more like IRC than forums, but it's generally much easier to stay on topic and the smaller crowd sizes make moderation a much simpler process. I'm also just fine with folks like us scattering into niche spaces. Our interests are niche, our habits are niche, a niche space suits us more than the "social media mall." (I also do use social media for more social media like experiences, but I consider that to be separate from chatting topically about my interests.)

Man. I'm old.

I'm goin' back to /. where CowboyNeil at least warned us when he was going to do something stupid.

I was there the day they introduced commenting.

Why don't niche subreddits just start web forums up again? It's simple enough to pay the hosting bills with some sideroll ads (that clever admins could even sell at a premium, thanks to their highly niche audience). Of course, today's Reddit mods would have to reskill a bit to run a forum, pick up some admin tasks, etc. But if they're already donating tons of free time to moderate that might not be a huge deal.

I use maybe 2-5 subreddits at this point because Reddit has rotted out so much. At least half of those are shutting down permanently as a result of the API changes, and the other half are participating in the blackout. I don't need a shared account across all of those services. In fact, I tend to visit subreddits individually anyway so I don't have to guess about the context of every post.

None of my favorite subreddits rely heavily on photo posts, which keeps hosting costs low. In fact, I notice a strong association between quality and text-only subs, likely because it keeps the lowest quality memes away.

It might not work for every subreddit -- I don't anticipate the denizens of /r/funny would embrace a web forum -- but for hobby, book, and series-related communities, web forums have been around a whole lot longer than Reddit. Reddit only took over because it was marginally cheaper and easier to host; if mods lose their useful mod tools and power users lose bearable and efficient methods of browsing, forums start to look mighty attractive again.

Is there something like phpbb or vbulliten but with threaded comments? Reddit's comments experience was pretty nice at the time. Information dense. Same as this site

I think it's primarily because of discovery. Reddit makes it really easy to find communities for your interests and makes it low effort to start engaging with them. I don't need to check 10 different forums, I just load up my Reddit home page.

> There's nowhere to go for us classic forum people.

You are already here