I still run a couple of fairly popular forums which I setup coming on nearly 15 years ago now. All powered by phpBB and recently Flarum was used for the latest site.
There's still demand there for smaller communities and while some members have dropped off over the years it's still the most popular way to keep in touch with the latest happenings, none of the other social networks really took any of the traffic away.
I'd love to see more spring up - for me there's always more of a community feel, you get to know the regulars and everyone is there for that specific topic.
It's a little clunky these days but it's still a great piece of forum software.
I still run 4 different web forums, and they still get a bunch of traffic. They all used to be phpBB back in the day, but all were migrated to Discourse a long time ago.
There are still old phpBB forums that are still going strong, but that sort of thing depends enormously on having a committed core of people keeping it going and weeding out the trolls and spammers. Keeping a public forum running these days is beyond a full-time job, and a lot of people just don't have the time for that, especially in today's environment with hostile states, scammers, and general jerks trying to ruin everything.
I'm a member of at least half a dozen phpBB forums right now. They do still exist. Even if Reddit is more popular, remember that forums in 1998 didn't have millions of members either.
Some still exist, but you are right, most people moved to Reddit, Facebook, Discord, etc... If people can't one-click log into a site using FB/Google or their existing Discord account, then it will be a tiny community at best. Forum software is still actively maintained however. They might regain traction if there were simple ways to integrate them into Discord [1] or FB with SAML auth. Link below is not quite on topic, but you can see some are interested in Discord integrations.
I had a PHPBB in 199X for a small group of friends / club. It would frequently get hacked or spammed if you didn't update patches and monitor it quite closely which was annoying. Most of the forums I use (apart from this one) have moved to Facebook which is awful in terms of searching historical posts, but okish for small realtime groups and 0 cost/work. Reddit was good of course but not it's kind of annoying. Usenet was big when I had my own site. There are still a few custom built forums that I frequent as well. Please don't say Twitter...
Yeah I miss the 2000s era of small, community-focused forums/message boards built using tools like phpBB. It was great to be able to have unique identities on one forum, say for sports, and another entirely different site's forum for say, music.
Fortunately, some boards like the Rate Your Music one still mimic the feel of those times.
Reddit and Facebook however killed most forums and blog comments sections.
Forum platforms have either been dead for twenty years or they’ll never die.
Admittedly, the days of “everyone runs their own phpBB” are long gone (basically, Facebook killed them), but no single social network can replace structured, threaded discussion boards yet.
I think the infrastructure has rusted a bit. A while back I wanted to spin up a forum, and I wasn't super impressed. There's a mix of new projects that don't really get the forum thing (they're often very focused on businesses rather than communities), and old PHP projects which haven't advanced since the early 2000s.
This also goes for the infrastructure around forums - several turnkey sites I tried simply didn't work, and I ended up deploying one myself through a crufty Bluehost portal. Given that a lot of forum activity is driven by non-tech people, I'm not surprised they've started dying out. It's a shame, but the monoliths like FB have both the audience and the on-ramps.
Edit: as a side note, I eventually gave up because I couldn't get my target community to join the forum. Most people were already on a Facebook group and uninterested in switching.
Maybe it's just my experience. Every phpbb community I was part of moved years away to Facebook, Reddit or (now) Discord. Some of the forums linger on, almost completely deserted by their former users :/
I thought so, too. There are still enough communities hosted on phpBB, there are still enough ways to tinker around, join IRC, find ridiculous geocities-like websites or whatever. It's more that people choose to use FB, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram.
As is Something Awful, which OP lists as inspiration. The forums are apparently still self sustaining financially, but I don't believe the user count has moved significantly for around a decade.
It's unfortunate that classic web forums are dying, they're so much more useful as repositories of information than the subreddits, Discords, and Facebook groups that have replaced them over the years.
There's still demand there for smaller communities and while some members have dropped off over the years it's still the most popular way to keep in touch with the latest happenings, none of the other social networks really took any of the traffic away.
I'd love to see more spring up - for me there's always more of a community feel, you get to know the regulars and everyone is there for that specific topic.
It's a little clunky these days but it's still a great piece of forum software.
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