What do you think will happen if forums become mainstream again?

[Skyweaver]

Many people, myself included are enamored with the idea of the humble web forum making a revival. But if it were to become popular, perhaps to the point of it hitting the mainstream, here's what I think would happen.

First, the bad ending.

For those who are fans of Technology Connections, this video may be familiar to you. But if not, the gist is that ceiling fans have had a surprising history. They were around before electricity, driven by water wheels or steam. In the late 19th century they were electrified and by the early 20th century they were very popular in public spaces. By the mid century they fell out of favor due to cheap AC. Then the 70s energy crisis brought them back due to both necessity and nostalgia. However the nostalgia and aesthetics aspect led to ceiling fans being cheapened out to the point of them barely functioning, causing a second decline which we see today.

You may be thinking how this relates to forums. I personally see many parallels: Forums were around BEFORE the WWW we know today, and were a very popular way to communicate online from the 90s till the 2010s. Then they shrank in popularity due to social media. Now forums are having somewhat of a nostalgic revival due to enshittification of social media. Heck, Daniele63, owner of the Frutiger Aero forums, reminds me of Burton Burton, founder of a ceiling fan company. Both are obsessed with nostalgic aesthetics and items; the former with Frutiger Aero design and 2000s media, the latter with early 20th century mechanical novelties and antiques. (I think Melon also falls into a similar thing but TBH I know daniele more, sorry melon ) What I'm afraid is that along the way large companies may start making their own "forum" sites and repeat the same steps they did with social media. Or there may be an "eternal september" situation.

A better ending is that since people can make a forum and run it how they please, this may result in an increase of all sorts of forums, good, bad and ugly. But perhaps that diversity is the point: Anyone can choose a forum that suits their needs and if it gets bad, they can leave without fear of leaving other communities behind, since it's just ONE community they leave. Unlike ceiling fans, it's almost always free to join a forum, though making a free forum is iffy. I think the web revival at large really needs a good free forum hoster, but I digress. This other ending is more akin to the vinyl revival IMO: nowadays there's a whole world of record players: good, bad and ugly.

[sproutknip]

Wow I love that I learned something about ceiling fans here! Wasn’t expecting that!

I’m optimistic that your “bad end” scenario won’t happen, though. The modern internet is so “forward” thinking and tunnel-visioned onto what it does, I can’t imagine these big companies investing into forum culture again.

That said, I am hopeful that forums such as this one will continue to flourish on the Wild Web! There is such an appeal to these truly human online spaces, and I think more and more people will stumble into them having seen them mentioned on social media, etc.

Perhaps we’ll be lucky to see even more robust forums like this sprouting up. I sure hope so! I love to see how each cultivates their own sense of culture!

[ValyceNegative]

I feel like the intrinsecally slow and intimate nature of forums is exactly what drives social media corpos away from them, and whenever we had socmeds try and offer a platform that would either "substitute" or "improve" on the forum formula (see Reddit and Discord) they were platforms that took slow communication and "niche-ness" out of the equation, resulting in something that fails comparing to a forum at all. So I don't see them jumping on the forum bandwagon.

[inert_a]

I don't think forums can ever take back their "market share" of the internet's mode of socializing, but with the internet's population (and the amount of time each person spends online) being so much more than it was in the heyday of the forum, I think it would only take a very small resurgence for the experience of forum users to match or exceed how it was in the 1990s and 2000s.

As to the ceilingfanification of the forum, I think that really already happened. I do remember a time when it seemed like every brand, store, homepage, and half-finished indie game project had its own forum with many dozens of boards and not a single post, or in the later times many posts of spam but not a single human user. An unused or low-quality forum doesn't really take any oxygen away from a unpopular one (no-one is likely to be subjected to it against their preference like they might be subjected to a ceiling fan in a public place), so my hope is that that won't happen.

[Peri L'Flamme, Towerkin of Magma]

i personally think that forums fundamentally are not like social media. 99.996% of them dont have shitty ads, or a very boring SEO-optimised design, or are vibe-coded, or have dark patterns, or none of what modern internet websites have usually! i can see like a tiktok influencer or something getting a forum to blow up, but with time its differences from the rest of the web will weed out everyone who would rather be on discord instead and then it just becomes a forum again. neat!

[Magic16]

I think forums are cool in many ways, such as being able to seriously customize how the place looks, and able to create stylized messages.

That being said, I think there are certain things in the way that do stop forums from cultivating mainstream success.
First off, posting messages bit cumbersome, and old school in many ways. There's no live previews, it's hard to see the forum post one is replying to, either having to scroll down, or use a separate tab. Many forums also tend to not do too well on mobile due to lack of responsive design.

Forums are fun, just not very practical. People don't want to have to remember many different logins, or become friends with someone, then all the sudden, forum shuts down.

What could potentially work, is maybe a something like a mix between Reddit and Signal, where forums are hosted by the creator, and an API keep one login, and does the work of translating the design to mobile. Granted, I do think this type of platform would gain traction with an "interesting" audience; scammers, political extremists, illegal activity...
ya know what, it's hard to think of a way to make forums work

I think the closest we would get, is something along the lines of Reddit+Discord+Myspace+Nekoweb. I think Discord would be in the best position to bring the concept to life, as it's very similar to the old internet in many ways, specifically chatroom, and surfing.

[Limette]

I could see forums making a comeback through one particular platform: Fluxer.

Fluxer is an open-source Discord clone that's been gaining traction due to Discord's enshittification, and unlike Discord, it can be self-hosted (and will eventually be federated). Yesterday they finally released their own version of Discord's forums, but there's one really cool future plan they have for this feature: eventually, you'll be able to publish Fluxer forums to the web, making it so even people who haven't joined your Fluxer community can view them. They even want to add RSS feeds for forum channels.

So, you get Discord-style forums + web publishing + RSS.

The reason they listed for developing this feature is because of the frustration of dev and resource communities only having private discrod servers that require you to join to get help. Making the forums publicly viewable (even if you still need to join to post) would fix a lot of that.

If Fluxer (and their public forum feature) ends up taking off, I think this has the potential to make forums more common again. Discord-style forums are very accessible and easy to set up after all, and they're closer to classic forums than something like Reddit.

I doubt that it will cause classic forums to become popular, but it would be a decent modernized version.

[Skyweaver]

[Fluxer] finally released their own version of Discord's forums, but there's one really cool future plan they have for this feature: eventually, you'll be able to publish Fluxer forums to the web, making it so even people who haven't joined your Fluxer community can view them. They even want to add RSS feeds for forum channels.

I doubt that it will cause classic forums to become popular, but it would be a decent modernized version.

I'm excited to see where this is headed, since I'd love to see a shift away from the standard social media format in general, whether it's traditional forums or modern decentralized systems.
Has Fluxer published more information about how their forums work? What are the differences between a traditional forum and Fluxer's forums?

[Limette]

I'm excited to see where this is headed, since I'd love to see a shift away from the standard social media format in general, whether it's traditional forums or modern decentralized systems.
Has Fluxer published more information about how their forums work? What are the differences between a traditional forum and Fluxer's forums?

Fluxer's forums are at their base a copy of Discord's forums. So, each forum thread works as a real-time chat. (Hence why I don't refer to them as classic forums.) They're a bunch of sub-chats with forum-based navigation. Unlike Reddit there is no upvotes system, so threads are ordered according to their recency like you'd expect them to.

There haven't been much news about the web publishing and RSS feeds, besides them being on the roadmap for 2026/early 2027, but I assume that the public web version of a Fluxer forum would look/function largely the same as the in-app counterpart, besides being read-only. Although I personally hope that the web version will have pagination instead of infinite scroll like the app does.

I'm curious how the RSS feeds would work with chat-forums, too. I don't think getting a feed update for every single message would work, but who knows how they'll manage it.

I don't think Fluxer-style forums would impede on or influence classic forums much (unless Fluxer REALLY blows up in popularity, perhaps), but it could be very useful for developers and organizations that have previously used Discord to grow their communities. I really hope it fills at least that niche, since I don't like joining Discord servers just so I can ask a community for help with a game I'm stuck on, or to get pinged for updates. Being able to browse the web-version of their forum to get the information without joining would be nice.

[inert_a]

Whether it be Fluxer (which I had not heard of until just now, but am interested in), or some other way, I do think that there are some good ideas on the modern internet that can support the revival of the forum concept.

Federation is surely near the top of that list. I can imagine some kind of federated forum software where individual boards could be voluntarily shared between forums. It was often the case that forums would have vaguely adjacent or entirely off-topic boards that would be low in traffic. If both a game development forum and a cooking forum happen to have an off-topic board for posting your own sketches, if those two forums could voluntarily federate the shared board, it would help maintain activity at both.

I think small communities that are self hosted around specific interests with optionally federated common boards would make for a very interesting internet.