I see a lot of people saying online that “forums are dying off because of discord and reddit”
yet other people reply: “Well, I’m still using my forum/IRC.”
So I have to ask, what forums that are decently big still exist? Only one I can think of is Nomutantsallowed for fallout related content.
Usually something hyper specific. This was a few years ago but I found a very bustling community forum for appliance repair. I posted a question on how to fix my oven and got very detailed answers and technical info involving the circuit board and heating element and troubleshooting steps. Unfortunately the general consensus on there is that for a lot of appliances, the board needs replaced which may or may not be available, and if it is, costs damn near what a new appliance does. Which is obviously done on purpose to drive sales.
The other one I know is my friend will participate on one for modding Toyota Yaris cars.
Bodybuilding / fitness forums are still pretty active.
All of these tend to have subreddit or Lemmy equivalents however.
It seems that this might be useful to add to this pile of information:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/federation-support-for-discourse/90921
cs rin.ru and ltt foums
I regularly visit https://vogons.org/ to talk about retro computers.
I used to use RPG.net a lot. They have pretty strict moderation, which keeps the place from turning into some kinds of shit holes. But you also can’t tell someone they’re a fool, or all Republicans are traitors. Takes some getting used to, but is probably worth it.
Gbatemp is one.
Does anyone remember Megalinks on Reddit? They started a forum after it was shut down, I was lucky enough to get invited before they closed registration. The forums are still very active and it’s the best community I’ve experienced online. I spend as much time there as I do here.
Retrogametalk and segaxtreme
Larger open-source projects tend to have forums. Here’s a few off the top of my head:
Openstreetmap also has some forums. The main one being community.openstreetmap.org
Blenderartists.org for blender news, learning, and sharing of addons and stuff
I love how Whirlpool has stuck to it’s guns with regards to staying text only.
It survived a world of phpbb, avatars, and animated GIFS and is now surviving a world of social media and “engagement”. It’s like Usenet with moderation and no binaries.
Helps that it’s fast as blazes too.
There are some good Matrix community, on matrix.org as well as individually run homeservers (federated).
is there a matrix client for Android? last I checked there was like, one, and it wasn’t very good. whereas there’s like 14 different Lemmy apps, many of which are fabulous.
I am not a big fan pf matrix but I think SchlidiChat was the one I used most successfully on android.
From what I have seen a main issue with Matrix is that the protocol can be implemented in bits and pieces. Which is perfectly fair but it leads to an inconsistent user experience. The default web clients you first use to try it out will be using strong encryption settings by default but then a lot of the mobile or native desktop clients don’t support encryption. So it’s difficult to get going finding cross platform apps that have all the desired functionality consistently between them.
In terms of the apps, I don’t think comparing matrix to lemmy is exactly fair for this reason.
FluffyChat is pretty good these days https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/
matrix isn’t a forum. it’s a chat.
Incorrect. Technically Matrix is a protocol, and a forum client can be made. You already have some PoC social media ones. It just so happens that most well known clients at this time and for instant messaging. But it can be much more.
www.knockout.chat
