Most importantly, they're searchable on the internet.

If you thought Reddit or Lemmy mods were bad, wait until you deal with a forum admin on a power trip.

Linear forums sucked. Reddit provided the sane solution: nested comments and vote-based sorting.

Last month someone linked to Something Awful, for a thread about the site's greatest stories. Cramping my scroll-wheel finger and wearing out my patience, forty tall-ass posts at a time, each of them festooned with signatures and animated GIFs and a mile of whitespace - I cannot tell you instantly exhausting it was to see the thread had four hundred pages. Seeing any one question answered required scrolling through ten of them. X mentions a thing, Y asks about it a page and a half later, and Z jokes about it three pages on, and then fffinally someone tells Y what's going on.

This is interest poison. This is a format that actively targets engagement and destroys it. Did you miss a day or two? Kiss it goodbye, because you're never going to catch up and still give a shit.

Forums never went anywhere. It's just that the techno hipsters found something new.

Those who do not understand Usenet are doomed to reinvent it, poorly.

Uh. Ever try to follow along in a forum when people start quoting each other and then having side conversations? The old forum layout sucks, Lemmy and Reddit with their parent-child thread-based systems are infinitely better.

Posts a problem on a thread

PLEASE SEARCH BEFORE YOU ASK A QUESTION. THREAD HAS BEEN CLOSED, HERES A LINK TO THE RULES

searches with incorrect wording or phrasing and tries again

PLEASE WAIT 30 SECONDS BEFORE SEARCHING AGAIN

Finds tangentially related thread but not quite your problem and posts to it to see if anyone has had similar issues

BANNED FOR NECROING

extra points if you do it through facepunch

So that's the reason why in the Star Trek future there's a whole chunk of 21st Century history missing. Not because of a global war, but because everyone was posting on Slack, Discord, and gated social networks.

Discord for a group of your friends? Fantastic. Discord for a game/company/organization? Miserable.

Waiting on federated forums to become a thing. I guess one could host a simple phpBB forum and let users create sub forums or categories for their own use?

Seriously, Discord is so chaotic I can't even use it.

I don't really see a lot of overlap between these technologies. To me, forums are useful for getting help / sharing knowledge on a particular topic, reporting bugs / checking for known issues in an application or product... Things like that, where the organization and retention of the information is a benefit.
Discord is a place for keeping up with friends, finding a group for a game, or discussing something current with people that share an interest (e.g. discussing the latest episode of X show). Slack is for keeping up with current things and chatting with team members at work, and following alerts for an application that you're supporting (because that's way better than email alerts). I recognize that there are people that use these technologies differently, but they each have their own niche that I wouldn't want to use the others for. Forums are not a great tool for instant communication or relatively "chaotic" discussion (it's a lot harder to follow the splitting chains of thought compared to breaking side conversations into threads that are still easy to follow along in a channel), and nobody wants to constantly refresh to keep up with the conversation.

Jokes on you, i never left forums.

I'm not saying that discord servers for support are a good solution -- I think the problems with archiving and search alone should disqualify it as a support platform.

But forums have their own problems. I think it's weird that forum advocates don't seem to consider why it started to fade as a medium. Individual accounts for each forum, the need for active moderation of threads for relevancy, and practices that made for negative user experiences like rules against necroing are all valid reasons (among others) for why people moved away from forums. And I can't think of a great way to prevent the "I need help!!" thread titles besides having moderators or approvals.

Knowledge management is hard, there's a reason why library science is a master's level degree lol

I don't know how people can stand large chatrooms

The thread games you could play in forums were better than anything reddit clones and irc clones could muster.

You cannot possibly expect people to sit there after they type their shit frothing in the mouth waiting for any reply or stimulation because you deprived them of the ability to send their floaty emojis and see numbers move around. Imagine that.

I like how Discourse is becoming more and more popular for FOSS communities, but would love if it supported federation

wikis for knowledge, IM for socialization. forums for serious discussion? thank god i don’t have to manage this stuff i have no idea what i’m saying