I'm on forums like these and they're doing totally fine. And if anything with the recent Reddit SNAFU the last thing users there want is for some central authority in SV to decide what they're allowed to talk about.
They've all abandoned forums and, regrettably, moved on to Facebook or Discord. I'll never understand why they choose Discord, a closed chat platform, for forum type discussions. At this point I feel like Quixote tilting at the wind mills.
https://www.audioheritage.org/vbulletin/
https://el34world.com/Forum/index.php (A simple machines forum, this guy has been here forever, and he wrote his entire online shop himself)
There are a LOT of niche forums out there that are not FB/Discord, and keeping track of them is a pain. I do wish newsgroups were still a thing for hobbies.
I do wonder though, why on earth are so many communities moving to facebook and Discord, the two platforms that are decidedly worse than either usenet or phpbb. Some have come to realize facebook was a mistake, but may be committing an even worse one by moving to Discord.
Usenet and e-mail. Both message formats supported referencing the message being replied to since the early days:
* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc822#section-4.6
* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc850#section-2.2.6
cave paintings => petroglyphs => pictograms => writing => printing => telegraph => telephone => wireless radio => television => compuserve => aol => newsgroups => digg => reddit ===> VR=====> neurolink ==========> “quantum ascension”
How’s this? Amazing how things have changed and how little foresight I have to see what comes next.
Facebook often doesn't even show you interesting discussions if the discussion is interesting to you but not for the average person.
Yet, for some reason, years ago most niche communities I belonged to ditched perfectly serviceable phpbb forums and moved to Facebook. Now there's a second exodus to Discord, as braindead as the one before.
And I truly don't understand Reddit to Discord. It has little or nothing to do with moderation or disagreement with Reddit policies, mind you. At least the ones I've seen, the reason is as vague as "wouldn't it be cool to have a Discord?". Why is never answered clearly.
Get a reader and sign up on https://www.eternal-september.org
The days of open servers are gone, but fairly permissive authenticated servers exist.
> Eternal September or the September that never ended[1] is Usenet slang for a period beginning around 1993[2] when Internet service providers[2] began offering Usenet access to many new users. The flood of new users overwhelmed the existing culture for online forums and the ability to enforce existing norms. AOL followed with their Usenet gateway service in March 1994,[3] leading to a constant stream of new users. Hence, from the early Usenet point of view, the influx of new users in September 1993 never ended.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, Usenet and the Internet were generally the domain of dedicated computer professionals and hobbyists; new users joined slowly, in small numbers, and observed and learned the social conventions of online interaction without having much of an impact on the experienced users. The only exception to this was September of every year, when large numbers of first-year college students gained access to the Internet and Usenet through their universities. These large groups of new users who had not yet learned online etiquette created a nuisance for the experienced users, who came to dread September every year.
The problem was the original maintainers had long sense expired, and each new phpBB release caused cascading bugs and became unmanageable. That and the increasing cost of running the servers, and the lack of backups and general maintenance.
The loss of these forums was real tragedy. So many thousands of priceless contributions from the original guru's has now been lost forever.
Also, HN's custom forum software feels significantly different than phpbb and similar forums: no quote blocks, no different fonts and colors, no embedded images, etc.
Which forums do you mean? Every community I was part of has moved to facebook groups, Reddit or Discord. PhpBB has gone the way of the dodo (regrettably, since those were the "good old days" for me, since I never used usenet).