I miss traditional message boards. No karma, no sorting algorithms, you just get new topics on top and replies are sorted oldest to newest.
You can have forum threads that go on for decades, but Lemmy’s default sorting system quickly sweeps older content away. I’m aware you can mimic the forum format by selecting the “chat” option in a thread and sorting by old, and you can sort posts by “latest comment” which replicates the old-school forum experience pretty well, but nobody does it that way, so the community behaves in the manner facilitated by the default sorting algorithm that prioritizes new content over old but still relevant content.
I also notice that I don’t pay attention to usernames on Lemmy (or Reddit back when I was on it). They’re just disembodied thoughts floating through the ether. On message boards, I get to know specific users, their personalities and preferences and ups and downs. I notice when certain users don’t post for a while and miss them if they’re gone for too long.
I still use them, because they’re awesome.
They’re not gone, although there are quite a bit fewer than some time ago.
The people demands names !
What about https://www.kiaevforums.com/?
As you can see it’s a kind of niche forum for EV made by Kia, but there are several of these niche forums.
Most often they’re not very crowded, but I like them being more calm than some other places on the internet.
I have some more of these, but they are really only helpful/interesting, if you fit into that niche and in that case you’ll find them easily through search engines.
We Australians are blessed to have Whirlpool. They’ve been around for nearly three decades and are still thriving.