@anemone @evelyn @arcana @sun Culturally fedi is already probably the closest to old forums. Minus the heavy-handed moderation and stupid amounts of thread locking that killed many forums. You just have to follow the right people that still sort of use it as a form of discussion around a topic and not like Twitter, ie. hellthreads that don't evolve into complete shitposting.

Sure, it's not ideal especially when you get flooded with notifs and there's no search function to search for topics as if they were threads like forums have, but it's somewhat close.

The reason why forums die quickly these days is because micro-blogging replaced them and without a general and large topic for the forum, they quickly run out of topics. When you look at the surviving forums, it's either a forum for a software project (Discourse), KF as a gossip forum and Vogons for vintage computing.