Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.

The forums I frequented, started to slowly allow more and more ultra right, misogynist, racist, and fascist users. They allowed them to break the rules saying they were giving them leeway and the benefit of the doubt, while holding the rest of the long time users to an even higher standard than they were before, when dealing with these new users.

All that made all the forums unbearable, and after bringing it up several times and getting nowhere, I left them. And so did the other long time users one after the other.

I checked back on them a few years later and I regret nothing. One turned into a cesspool of fascist, racist, and misogynistic echo chambers. The others are gone.

I don't know how much of that is representative of the whole, but since it was several forums that it happened to and all the ones I was using, it warps my perception.

I think this to be a consequence of forums being isolated from each other, while communities in Discord/Reddit are connected.

If you want to talk about N different topics in forums you need to register N times, check N separated feeds, and establish your presence N times. This quickly piles up, and while you might stick to one or two forums you'll eventually ditch all the others.

In the meantime Discord/Reddit streamline the process. Even if I spend most of my time in r/apples, I'm already able to post in r/bananas, r/cherries, r/durians etc. If I were to subscribe to all of those, I'd see new content from them in a single feed. And people from those comms will see my activity in r/apples and know "hey, this is not a troll", so my presence is already half-established.

The problem is that Discord/Reddit have a single point of failure: the administration can enshittify the whole thing. And they did. Then we get something like the Fediverse picking the best bits of forums (self-governance, no single point of failure) and Discord/Reddit (less isolation).

Meanwhile I'm trying to exit discord as enshitificaton accelerates.

Sad to not see Lemmy or the Fediverse mentioned as a potential solution