I miss all the old forums that have died out. Still some gems out there, but not nearly as active anymore as far as my hobbies and interest go.

Unfortunately, running an online forum has been a pain for a long time. You have to promote the forum to keep it active, deal with various bad actors (historically spammers, trolls, and black hats), maintain the forum, deal with drama, etc. It adds up and largely isn't appreciated. People act like a forum exists by itself, but it doesn't.

And in the last 5 years, running an online forum has become more of a pain given how badly behaved some bots are. Just recently, I installed Anubis on some online forums I run, and I've been amazed by how much traffic dropped. Before, server load was becoming a problem to the point where all the forums I ran were taken offline by their hosts! I have been thinking about how there's a need for a forum software which produces static HTML for the content, while all dynamic components are behind a login. Bots won't increase server load much in this case. If the forum administrator decides to end the forum, they can easily keep hosting the content without any future maintenance beyond paying the bills. Two of the forums I run are just archives at this point, and I'd love to be able to flip a switch and make them static HTML... (I probably will adapt some script I found on GitHub do to this in the future, maybe with help from LLMs.)

Ironically, when people moved their communities to Reddit and discord they only helped to enable the AI theft of this culture

Forums were easy to search. The threads were mostly chronological and easy to stay in touch with.

These corporate platforms are designed to promote reposting. Always “new” content and impossible to find anything else. keep the user reloading that feed at all costs. And behind the scenes the corporations are mining your activity

I’m somewhat optimistic that as future generations of LLMs keep scanning this new LLM driven social media landscape, the models will collapse and the content will just suck more and more.

And people with interesting takes and novel ways of expressing them leave the corporate platforms, and we return to the humble days of user owned platforms without all the bots

After all, it’s easier than ever to build a platform now that we have LLMs to do all the chore work

I really don't like hearing people complain that they miss communities that have died out. You can't expect someone else to create a community, because what you're going to get is a corporation creating one in exchange for money.

If you miss a community, go be a part of one, that'll help everyone! I'm a part of a maker community and it's fantastic, the only thing that's missing is more makers talking about the weird stuff they're building!