I was initially optimistic about Lemmy but it doesn’t seem to have caught on much, certainly not enough to truly compete with the likes of Reddit. Also, it doesn’t seem to have caught on except for topics involving technology. Even as someone really proactive trying to branch out into forums, it is next to impossible to find forums analogous to the forums of the 2000s/early 2010s. Has it truly died out? Is there any way to replicate it?
The one thing I can think of is to have a foundation built firmly on open source principles, which works on its UI and marketing to the point where network effects can truly take off. Most open source alternatives really do not focus enough on UI and general appeal to make this work.
I’m happy to be proven wrong; if I’m just not looking in the right places, please do link them!
Those old forums haven’t gone anywhere. They aren’t very populous, but this also has the upside of making your presence on a forum all the more potent.
If you’re looking to start your own, forum software has broken up onto two styles: The ‘modern’ hyper-interactive javascript based stuff (Discourse, Flarum…) and the ‘oldschool’ stuff (phpBB, nodeBB, asmBB…)