Lemmy is great and it is in essence an aggregated forum. But I would like to know how I can also find forums about specific topics.
For example I am very interested in football but the only place I can really find any discussion of football is r/soccer on reddit. I would like to find smaller but active forums where the discussions are more slow paced and drawn out over time.
I would like to know how to find these places on the internet, if they still exist, for any topic.
Well in today’s internet there’s Reddit, Facebook and Discord. You have specific Reddit threads for specific things. Other than that, the internet‘s basically dead.
Edit: I got downvoted by 3 people without them actually showing me why I would be wrong. I take from that that they don’t like what I said and that I was right.
It is what it feels like, but it’s not really 100% this way (yet). It is a bad self-reinforcing cognitive bias: we think “forums are dead, that’s why we stick to the sitename” instead of actually finding dozens of still alive forums and going there, in turn sitename gets more populated while forums feel more dead. But there are still plenty alive. Also, there are relatively new kinds of forums which sometimes work very well for their niche, like Discourse communities for example.
I think the claim that the internet is dead outside of that is not true. I just think that the way in which we discover things has changed so substantially that it seems that outside of the big players it is hard to find stuff.
For example if you google
nostupidquestions forumthis community does not come up. Even you search fornostupidquestions communityit does not come up within the first 3 pages. Since searching is the gatekeeper for most discovery of new places on the internet we find new things less.That’s just an example of why it is hard to find slightly nice things nowadays.
I mean, a quick search with “football forum“ could’ve easily shown you that you are wrong.
Football does indeed seem to have some active forums that appear to be what I sort of had in mind. Feel silly for not asking of a better example!
There’s Hoffman music forum. Private torrent sites have great forums for different genre’s of art. There are forums for writers, queer people, furries, and almost every other subculture out there.
Whachutalkin’ about, Willis?