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I used to run some pretty decently sized forums and did paid jobs customising forums for various niche hobbies. I’ve had more emails in the last 6 months asking

by sen 4y ago

I used to run some pretty decently sized forums and did paid jobs customising forums for various niche hobbies. I’ve had more emails in the last 6 months asking me to help old forums get going again, than I’ve had in the last 5-6 years combined. Most are going Discourse or Vanilla, some are wanting more custom things these days. All are saying that their userbase (that previously migrated to Reddit) are all crying out for an off-Reddit solution. Reddit did a Digg, which is endlessly hilarious.

MattKimber 4y ago
I'm getting the same sort of vibe from my corners of the Internet: people moving away from the big walled gardens and doing more distributed things like forums and running their own Mastodon instances. Some long-lived forums are undergoing amazing resurrections, seeing more posts in 2022 than they have between 2017-2021. I do pick up a general theme of being able to control the experience, whether that's the UI or being able to set moderation policies. IMO Reddit killed their vibe when they removed the distinction between post karma and comment karma, in the subs I visited it seemed to encourage the upvoting of very basic questions and observations that were easy to farm karma from by posting the same answers, comments and jokes every time. (I'm aware that some of the smaller and more actively moderated communities have escaped this, sadly it didn't cover the main ones I was interested in.)