[blenderob]

But something has definitely changed over the past few years. Back in the days, it felt completely normal for individuals to spin up and run their own forums. Small communities built and maintained by regular people. How many new truly independent, individual-run forums can you name today? Hardly any. Instead we keep hearing about long-time community sites shutting down because individuals can no longer handle the risks of user content. I've seen so many posts right here on HN announcing those kinds of shutdowns.

[Imustaskforhelp]

I feel like yes forums are being closed because they have migrated to the likes of things like discord

I have mixed opinions about discord and if I can be honest, I have mixed opinions about forums as well

My opinion is to take things like forums and transfer them over to things like xmpp/(Irc?)/(signal?)/(matrix most prefered)

There are bridges as well for matrix <-> Irc if this is something that interests you, there are bridges for everything but I prefer matrix with cinny and I generally think that due to its decentralized nature, it might be better than centralized forums maybe as well.

[pixl97]

>How many new truly independent, individual-run forums can you name today?

Almost none, but it's due to a lot of complicated factors and not just the direct risk of user content.

Take moderation of content that won't get you banned by your ISP. It sucks. Nobody in their right mind would want to do it. There are countless bots and trolls that are going to flood your forums for whatever cause they champion.

Then there is DDOS floods because you pissed off said bots and trolls. This can make the forums unaffordable and piss off your ISP.

But even if nothing goes wrong, popularity is a risk in itself. In the past there was stuff like the Slashdot effect where your site would go down for a while. But now if your small site became popular on tiktok for some reason 20 million people could show up. Even if your site can stand up to that, how will you moderate it? How will you pay for the bandwidth?

Oh, and will you get any advertisers because of said user content? How are you going to pay for the site?

Oh, also you're competing with massive sites for eyeballs, how are you going to get actual users?

[morkalork]

Is it consolidation of services? Waaaaay back in the day, imageboards like 4chan were "one complaint away from being shut down" but 24-hours later they'd be up again on another rag-tag hosting provider. Nowadays it's like one complaint to cloudflare or AWS and the site is dead dead.