All the forums I visited and participated in twenty years ago have been overrun with right clowns shouting into the void hoping to be noticed by anyone.
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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I was on several fitness forums back in the 00s. I think some are still around, but largely abandoned. Facebook groups, Reddit, and Discord all seem to have killed them off.
Depends on the subject, though they are definitely nowhere near as popular nor used anywhere near as much as in the past. Niche groups can probably be found, but I wouldn't know too much about where to look since I usually don't go to them.
Closest I go to is Steam Underground and that is just for certain files.
A couple of fully active mycology forums with helpful searchable information.
I'm a member of a couple of hobby-specific forums that are still doing okay and I think there is still some life left for them. The nice part is they tend to attract subject matter experts who will answer questions from newbies without the nastiness you see on StackExchange. The small number of users and the lack of public visibility keeps a lot of trolls away. But there aren't many left. Lots of them moved to groups on Facebook or other venues where the owner no longer has to manage their own server. When they do that sometimes their archives get lost, which sucks since who knows how long social media sites will keep things or whether they'll surrender the data for someone else to archive.
There's tons of active Q&A format Discourse forums for different things that I've ran into.
Forms are definitely less active than before but they're not dead yet
Thumpertalk.com is an active forum.
People hosted their own forums as there was no viable alternative, and you didn't care about legal liabilities, data governance, right to be forgotten, DDoS protection etc.
Most people (not all) will choose the easy option of an existing service. Of which the value for that service is to lock you in and spend all your time there.
Saying that I'm still active on multiple forums, but they've been around for years, and it's definitely an older nerdier demographic.
There's a live discussion on https://www.twitch.tv/zeropagehomebrew right now about Atari's aquistion of AtariAge with the homebrew developers and fans in the chat. To me, it's the last of the original forums around that still feels healthy, and everyone there is just hoping it won't get killed by Atari.
i remember when google ingested the newsgroup archive and spit it back out as deja news.. it was a tech support gold mine
Forums.realgm.com is still the best place for basketball talk.