About the Forum revival and how it relates to the indie web

[Skyweaver]

Why does it seem that forums aren't getting as much traction compared to personal sites? Sure, they can be much more complex to setup compared to some HTML and CSS, but I feel that bringing the personal site back into popularity without forums makes little sense. If the point of the indie web is to reduce the impact that corporations have in our online experience, why do so many indie web users not establish or use forums?

[Melooon]

What's your basis for the assessment that people don't use forums? Neocities has around 6000 publicly listed sites, and the SurfClub has 1555 members; its not a direct comparison in any way, but it means very loosely 1 in 6 people with a homepage on the biggest personal site host have an account on this forum, and there are other forums offering different moods and styles of community for people who don't fit in here.

I'm not saying your assessment is wrong, but I think in order to answer your question, you'd need to collect some hard data on how many people with personal sites use or don't use forums, and if you did that as a survey, you could directly ask them why they don't use forums rather than people here trying to guess 

It's worth remembering that personal sites, while growing in popularity, are still an incredibly small niche community! Forum people are a separate niche community (many forums don't overlap with personal sites at all). So what you're looking at is an overlap between two already small niches (and the niche of people successfully hosting a forum within that overlap is even more tiny.. there are like 5 of us  )

[kaos-chan]

As someone with a website, but no forum, I'd say it is really hard to find people, wanting to engage with your specific forum. Putting in a lot of work just to leave it abandoned doesn't make much sense. Also, my niche is True Crime, I don't think I can get many views with that, let alone commenters who actually discuss topics without moralizing. If it was a personal site, it would be even more difficult, because what on earth should I open new topics about?

What I was gonna say is; I'm happy if I get a message in my guestbook it's a rare phenomenon. I can't expect people to register to a dead forum, but if there were people wanting real discussion, I wouldn't mind creating a forum.

[Metropolis]

I think the thing is that first u kind of need to pay for forum stuff to start working, and that's a first obstacle. Second of all, we have Reddit, and many people feel like Reddit fills the need for a forum.

[lakes]

While I like forums, I think it boils down to 2 facts why most indie web creators don't also create forums:
1. A lot of people don't wanna moderate a forum. Moderation takes a lot of time and energy.
2. There aren't many popular free(mium) hosters for forums, unless you count Reddit which doubles as social media and possibly Reddit alternatives like Lemmy/Piefed. You could use Proboards but that's littered with ads unless the admin pays a subscription. So you're probably gonna have to use a VPS, especially if you wanna a PHP forum.
I do think people on the indie web are more open to using non-socmed forums that already exist however. A prime example being this site. 32 discourse cafe is another example. The indie web already requires a sense of curiosity & exploration about the internet. So it makes sense that webmasters would be more open to it. But at the same time, a lot of them also rely on social media (ie. Nekoweb's use of Discord) or in Neocities' case, socmed-esque feeds to keep in touch. I would like for there to be more forums outside of Reddit and Reddit copycats, but I don't think there's a clear answer.