There was a lot of engagement in the communities I participate up until a couple of years ago. People were interested and actively discussing a lot of topics. There were a lot of newbies asking questions and people proposing different ways for tasks.
Is it just me or did it reduce a lot? LLMs? Company forums? Other forums I did not move to (e.g. discord)? Reduced interest? Or is it just subjective?
As the kind of noob type to ask dumb questions, I talk out a lot of issues with larger LLM’s now. What I can not, I ask here.
I feel like the forums logins thing is too antiquated. I wish they would all be on the fediverse and compatible with Lemmy. I would love the depth and scope of many forums as niche communities with their own trees of subjects and discussions.
Even this is forum-like though. It’s a forum of people talking about a topic that interests them. It just happens to be distributed.
Yeah, but it lacks the tree that tends to support more specialization. I still get on the EEVBlog forum from time to time but that kind of concentration of specialization is just not the default.
To replicate that kind of ecosystem I think the platform would need a similar complex branching hierarchy and far more effective utility for searching. The element of time is too prioritized on a link aggregator like Lemmy. Community depth of specialization remains shallow because more intellectual engagement is slower and the mechanics of most recent comment engagement are not effective/implemented. Places like the EEVBlog often have the most engagement on very old threads that also concentrate a ton of history and useful information within the single thread. These threads are the primary anchor for the whole community. I think it would take some novel innovation to bridge a link aggregator’s ADHD with a forum’s depth and utility.