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Comment by e3bc54b2 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I went read-only on reddit via teddit.net and blocked main domain (reddit.com) in /etc/hosts. This forces me to make a conscious choice on opening a Reddit link.

All the forums that Reddit took over are making a comeback, this time with Discourse (probably Baader-Meinhoff, but I'm seeing it everywhere now).

Reddit had a good run, but as a place for real people to go to, its time is over.

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I used to run some pretty decently sized forums and did paid jobs customising forums for various niche hobbies. I’ve had more emails in the last 6 months asking me to help old forums get going again, than I’ve had in the last 5-6 years combined.

Most are going Discourse or Vanilla, some are wanting more custom things these days. All are saying that their userbase (that previously migrated to Reddit) are all crying out for an off-Reddit solution.

Reddit did a Digg, which is endlessly hilarious.

I'm getting the same sort of vibe from my corners of the Internet: people moving away from the big walled gardens and doing more distributed things like forums and running their own Mastodon instances. Some long-lived forums are undergoing amazing resurrections, seeing more posts in 2022 than they have between 2017-2021. I do pick up a general theme of being able to control the experience, whether that's the UI or being able to set moderation policies.

IMO Reddit killed their vibe when they removed the distinction between post karma and comment karma, in the subs I visited it seemed to encourage the upvoting of very basic questions and observations that were easy to farm karma from by posting the same answers, comments and jokes every time. (I'm aware that some of the smaller and more actively moderated communities have escaped this, sadly it didn't cover the main ones I was interested in.)

Discord while useful is pretty awful for finding information from communities you are not in given that you can't just google for 'random thing site:discord.com'. Forums might be coming back but even some of the bigger topics I follow don't really have a good forum (e.g. chess or Machine Learning), and with smaller communities I'm more likely to find a closer equivalent in a Facebook Group than a dedicated forum (e.g. Berlin or Berghain).

Discourse, not discord. Discord is a "we sell your data" app directed towards zoomers and gamers, nobody sane should promote it.

My bad, I automatically read Discord since it has been gaining huge popularity in the last few years while Discourse wasn't at the top of my mind for 'recently very popular communication software'.

It's not just you (as others have mentioned). In the last year, I've found myself with 3-4 Discourse-based forums that I check at least weekly. They're all special purpose and most of them I use for a single thread, but still, it's something.

If you want to start your own forum, I recommend FlaskBB. Discourse is awful on so many levels.

As someone who has never (at least knowlingly) encountered a flaskBB forum in the wild, what do you like about it? And what are your gripes about Discourse (the interface is bit whitespace-heavy and 'pop', but serviceable IMO)? Discourse has a LOT of moderation and QoL stuff baked in, so I'm just wondering. Is it the missing old-world feel?

What do I like about it? It's simple, it's written in Python using a fairly lightweight framework, it's easy to adapt and extend with plugins, and it rarely goes wrong in any remarkable way. It's run https://rangerovers.pub since it started.

I just don't like Discourse because it seems to have so many particularly colourful failure modes, like not ordering comments in a sane way, layout-breaking bugs if all 20GB of javascript doesn't download, and that bloody awful infinite scroll "hey instead of just clicking to go to the next page, why not wait a few minutes for an ajax request to time out and blank the page?"

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