What do you think forums could do to make a comeback over social media?

[Forums Forever]

I think that forums need more visibility. Social media is ubiquitous and hard to miss, but many don't even know about forums.

 

[Cedric]

I think that forums need more visibility. Social media is ubiquitous and hard to miss, but many don't even know about forums.

That's because us teens pretty much made forums alive and kicking and teens nowadays prefer other methods of social media and only old timers who were on forums and still prefer it that way will stay on forums. We need fresh blood, youth, but it's not an easy task to draw them in.

 

[Arantor]

I've long wondered if adding some social-like features to forums would help. I think it needs to be done very very carefully if attempted.

The ubiquity problem, though, that's much harder to solve. Part of the draw of the socials is that, well, everyone's already there. That's what made the journey to them during the latter half of the 2000s so interesting because there weren't social networks in the same league as them prior to, well, them.

Before that you had all the individual community spaces where people were - but once people realised there was a one-stop-shop for all the people they cared about, they went there because it was easier than going to a bunch of places regularly.

It's almost like you want some kind of aggregator across services to see the latest updates across all of them, but that requires collaboration on a scale that I don't believe is possible - since it would require the forum makers to come together with a common standard. I know we have RSS and most forums support it but it's really not the same.

We are seeing a slight change; folks in their teens and twenties tend to want to be where their parents aren't - so there was a point they were the dominant force on Facebook, on Twitter etc. because their peers were and their parents weren't, but as the generations move home, so too do the generations below them. It's fascinating to watch.

As I see it forums have two principle problems.

1. Discoverability inside a silo
2. Discoverability outside their own silo

The first problem is not really solved as much as people think - once you're on a forum, how do you find what's relevant and interesting? Yes, XFES helps, as well as similar technologies, but they're not the solution - they don't understand the content, they just do a search and look for matching words to find articles that talk about similar things. I often wonder if this is something AI can help with - but you need to be able to feed the material into an AI, and get sensible answers out, and for it to be basically free because while Twitter can afford to do this, hobbyists can't.

The second problem is the one that the socials sort of solved by accident. How do you find pockets of content? Well, back in the day we had affiliates and directories, and then Google came along and made forum finding quite easy - but in these 'enlightened times', the socials hoovered up a lot of that content and made it easy to find as long as you didn't care too hard about building relationships, and Google stopped caring about promoting the fringe content.

I don't think these problems are unsolvable, per se, but things need to change for them to be so, and there needs to be a step change in forums; there hasn't really been one since the modern bulletin board forum platforms began to exist on the web. There has, at best, been a half step in the works with the refocus that Discourse provided, but it's not a generational change.

 

[Kale]

Facebook and Twitter dying off would do wonders IMO. I also think if Reddit closed down that forums may make a come back in a big way too.

That's because us teens pretty much made forums alive and kicking and teens nowadays prefer other methods of social media and only old timers who were on forums and still prefer it that way will stay on forums. We need fresh blood, youth, but it's not an easy task to draw them in.

Yep, exactly. No teenager nowadays even uses forums. They rather stick to social media platforms and TikTok. I've never seen or met a teen who knows what a forum is.

 

[SpookyZalost]

So here's what I think. First I think that with twitter and Facebook losing people in droves forums might just make a comeback... just not in the way most people think... it's possible for the growing mastodon crowd to use some of the federated alternatives to Facebook to create groups and forums could actually occur that way though I'm not as familiar with federated software it still shows interesting promise.

Second I think the best things forums can do is help grow their communities while also creating an environment not like how geocities and early forums did 20+ years ago. For example by forming link exchanges and affiliations the communities cross pollinate and grow as a group. Also competitions and using spoke and wheel style communities where more specialized forums form around general discussion ones might help.

Finally I'm thinking it may be possible eventually to have something like Fidonet where cross forum messaging etc might be possible within grouped communities to create more of a social environment. But that's just my thinking on it.

 

[Kale]

So here's what I think. First I think that with twitter and Facebook losing people in droves forums might just make a comeback... just not in the way most people think... it's possible for the growing mastodon crowd to use some of the federated alternatives to Facebook to create groups and forums could actually occur that way though I'm not as familiar with federated software it still shows interesting promise.

I honestly don't know if Mastodon will take off if Facebook and Twitter did crap the bed. I have accounts on a few instances and hardly anyone interacts or engages with my posts/content there as it is.

 

[Arantor]

OK, so here's a spicy hot take.

Mastodon doesn't work as a Twitter replacement. Sorry. It just doesn't.

For a content platform that's decentralised, bingo, it works. But it doesn't do the one thing Twitter did: *discovery*. You can get a feed of your follows, you can get a feed of what your local instance follows, or a nightmare fuel timeline of randomised stuff that just flows in without you having any say in what's in it or whether you care - or indeed without you being able to read it before the next item has streamed in. (For any scale this is *utterly* useless when a new item appears every 3-4 seconds.)

But for a platform for showcasing new content that might be of interest? Failure, total failure.

The one advantage the socials have is precisely that: everything's in one place so your interests can be catered to with 'here's more things you might like' and that's the one thing Twitter had going right that no-one else had quite managed (pre Musk intervention, at least!)

Here's a second spicy hot take: no amount of ActivityPub or federated forums will fix this either - for exactly the same reason. Oh, if it ever takes off in *any* fashion it'll improve your world as a user because whichever instance is your home instance will become a hub that can fetch from other places. But in terms of responding *back*?

Firstly there is the problem to solve about authentication: you might follow someone and see content on a platform you're not a member of - but these platforms are not *solely* ActivityPub driven but will have 'legacy' accounts too. Which means you'll probably end up with a legacy account too as if you'd signed in with Facebook or similar. Then there's the question of permissions, which are hard enough normally to get right.

But even if those are solved (and they're far from unsolvable; plenty of precedent exists), we come to the big one. Forums thrive on being *communities*. ActivityPub will produce a string of drive-by interactions similar to how it does on Facebook and Twitter. And if *content* and *engagement* is your primary metric, that'll win out long term (probably).

But if your goal was to have a *community*? Federation is just one way to knock that on the head.

Consider the situation if we were to take a very small niche and apply the federated logic to it for just a moment. Consider: AdminJunkies, TheAdminZone, AdminIntel, ForumAdminForum, and for good measure let's also throw in RPG Directory (since there's more than one or two overlaps with that place)

Imagine what that will do in terms of community vibe. I cannot imagine for a moment that this would be in any way desirable - and yet this is exactly what the Fediverse would produce for forums. Something that can take on Reddit? Not a chance.

Honestly, I think the next step for forums is to build out OAuth - the same 'login with Facebook' style tech, it's an open standard and anyone can implement it - but between forums. It's much closer to what the forum world actually wants in practice and once that becomes more normalised we can talk about cross-forum updates/notifications. Because ActivityPub isn't the way to do this.

(And this is even before we talk about the dramas of scaling and moderation that Mastodon absolutely has in ways and scales that forums generally don't...)

 

[Kale]

Mastodon doesn't work as a Twitter replacement. Sorry. It just doesn't.

Nope, it sure doesn't work at all. I don't even care for or use it much.

 

[Dan The Man]

It's very challenging to make new forums in today's environment with competition of social media like Facebook groups, Discord, Reddit, etc. You'd have to be very good with SEO or have a means for mass promotion on social media to drive mass traffic to a forum.

 

[SpookyZalost]

Honestly, I think the next step for forums is to build out OAuth - the same 'login with Facebook' style tech, it's an open standard and anyone can implement it - but between forums. It's much closer to what the forum world actually wants in practice and once that becomes more normalised we can talk about cross-forum updates/notifications. Because ActivityPub isn't the way to do this.

(And this is even before we talk about the dramas of scaling and moderation that Mastodon absolutely has in ways and scales that forums generally don't...)

Here's my concern. Stuff like 0auth is absolutely a way for spambots to infiltrate and spread enmasse. I get the benefits. hell I'd love it if something like the ancient fido-net were possible between forums and 0auth would help with that in a big way. But spammers would latch onto that like a tick in the grass grabbing it's prey and wreak havoc.

 

[Heatman]

I don't see forums ever making the kind of comeback that's going to put it on the same level neck to neck with social media sites in the world today. Take a look at how TikTok is set up today and the kind of wave it carries, it's going to be very difficult to see forums operate in that same level. It's only down to the few old hard core forum lovers that's going to keep it moving and ticking.

 

[Henrywrites]

I don't see forums ever making the kind of comeback that's going to put it on the same level neck to neck with social media sites in the world today. Take a look at how TikTok is set up today and the kind of wave it carries, it's going to be very difficult to see forums operate in that same level. It's only down to the few old hard core forum lovers that's going to keep it moving and ticking.

A lot of frivolities are allowed on social media sites and that is the reason most of them are making such waves. Forums are where you can get to have mature discussions about life and other things that interest you.

 

[Heatman]

A lot of frivolities are allowed on social media sites and that is the reason most of them are making such waves. Forums are where you can get to have mature discussions about life and other things that interest you.

Yeah, that's exactly what I was trying to say. It's because what users are looking forward to being allowed for them to do is what social media sites allows and that's why they flock there. Most of these social media sites allow ladies to go almost naked and nothing is done but they can't do that on forums. It's why they ran.

 

[SpookyZalost]

Yeah, that's exactly what I was trying to say. It's because what users are looking forward to being allowed for them to do is what social media sites allows and that's why they flock there. Most of these social media sites allow ladies to go almost naked and nothing is done but they can't do that on forums. It's why they ran.

Depends on the forums but yeah I get what you're saying

 

[Heatman]

Depends on the forums but yeah I get what you're saying

Some forum with mature adult board allow for something like that to go on there. Apart from that, it's not what you easily see happening on forum. Unless there's a forum strictly for adults which I haven't seen yet.

 

[Arantor]

Stuff like 0auth is absolutely a way for spambots to infiltrate and spread enmasse

And yet in the last decade I've seen less spam that came in via OAuth methods than I *ever* saw from automated bots signing up.

 

[Heatman]

Depends on the forums but yeah I get what you're saying

I haven't seen any forum that allows such at least not in the open general board. I know about some forums having adult section, so something like that can actually go on in those areas.

 

[Reverie]

I think forums with specific to today's interests could grow. If forum software also grew to be more app friendly somehow, while keeping the great styles of their software! For example I wish we could download "Admin Junkies" as an app and it be on our homescreen ya'know? It would be much more reachable and it would remind us to use it more in a way.

Forums sharing tik toks could probably could popular, or getting tik tok followers, tik tok promotion forums... Discord forums advertising all the discord channels, gaming forums with twitches and etc linked. Specific game information would still be looked up.

I think we are all stuck in a generation that we grew up in, and we are not growing with the times and it's hard to figure out the first step to that.

 

[joelr]

There are some interesting answers and replies posted, but let me address the original post.

There are elements of social media that we should absolutely be studying and attempting to implement. For example:

• Greater personalizing and individualization of posts that are relevant, insightful, and lead to greater activity
• Feedback loops of attractive content

The computing power for these kinds of features will likely only be available on cloud-based platforms. Self-hosted individual forums will unfortunately be left behind in a technology gap.

 

[Arantor]

I think that last point is extremely important to unpick and understand: self hosted communities, as far as I'm concerned, simply must survive in some form. The cloud experience, while highly desirable for corporates, is not conducive to the sort of community spirit that the best *communities* (not the same as 'forums') thrive in.