this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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There are still plenty of active forums. Some of the old forum platforms didn’t make the shift to mobile very gracefully, and most of them have failed to put out good apps. So there are casualties by the road of change to be sure.
Reddit is huge and became a platform for forums. A lot of groups are also stuck on Facebook. Sigh.
But there are probably more active forums than ever, because there’s just so much more of everything on the internet now. Posting online used to be such a niche nerd thing to do. Most wouldn’t think of it. Social media cracked that egg open. Your grandma posts to a Facebook group.
Of course, if your definition of forums is super specific to the early days, it’s a different picture. There may be fewer vBulletin 2.0 powered web forums than 10 years ago… but there also may not.
That's a good point. A really good app that can parse a standard framework that a thousand independent forums can stand up for their own purposes (Say, MyBB for instance), would go a long way towards reviving the forum scene as a whole with a very Lemmy-like or reddit-like experience.
That app already exists and is called Tapatalk. I think almost every forum I've visited in the last decade has a banner on mobile that suggests using Tapatalk.
It's not very good though it seems.
Yeah Tapatalk tried to do that for VBulletin but the problem is that little vBulletin sites don’t have very deep pockets to delve. Little forum sites are supported by small time revenue like network ads, and limited brand sponsorships and the occasional member donation. There isn’t a lot of money in this scene as a whole, so there is relatively little innovation. In a way that’s fine. The last thing forums want is mass participation.
Make it a FOSS project then. No profit motive, no problem, right?
Granted, I understand that's hinging on someone actually wanting to work on this project for free. But I feel like FOSS decentralized forum software is something we might be able to get the grognards on board with.
Are there other good examples of successful open source mobile apps? Where the app client itself is open source?
Unfortunately those kind of apps would trip cloudflare's bot protection feature, which is used by a lot of independent forum operators.
You're either incredibly centralised on a platform you don't control, or incredibly fragmented between different smaller groups.