In the case of Mastodon this very much depends how you 'build' your personal timeline. It is empty at the start, and you have millions of people to follow.. or avoid following. Some countries have less inhabitants than the number of active users. I'm sure in most cases there are enough people around who are involved in ones particular non-tech interest areas.

As a self-identifying corner shop enthusiast, I think the magic of corner shops is that they're an exercise in shifting to a hopefully healthier mindset.

Before: Something always going on, most of it not adding appreciable value but keeping us engaged anyway, often through FOMO

After: Lots of silence and empty space, but people communicate with far more intent. The signal-to-noise ratio goes way up and rather than living plugged in constantly, you can easily keep up with the discussion checking in maybe every few days. It leaves space for a more mindful, deliberate life. (Okay, I'm overselling it a bit, but hopefully you get the idea)

However, it's not just a mindset thing. Beyond the usability challenges of Mastodon in particular, for the best social experience, in my opinion, you really _need_ to either operate your own server (of Mastodon or Pixelfed or whatever) or personally know someone who does (or at least be in some community with them). And that group == bored tech people. I don't really know of a solution for that besides node admins becoming more active as real-life community organizers but that's not the most common intersection of skills/interests.

To your last point, though, I recommend checking out the Tildeverse (https://tildeverse.org/). It's _extremely_ nerdy (hope you like IRC!), but I don't think the tech people there are bored. There's a community radio, various art projects, people making games and other console apps.... Of all the neat places I've hung out online, I think it's the one that's actively inspired me most.

It would be interesting if you could have a REPL in that style design, and you can reorder the panels of running processes, it reminds me of Yahoo, Lycos, Excite portals in the early web. I think they're also called portlets.

On most forums, there's an 800lb Gorilla who dominates everything, and they will set the tone of the place. I can think of two (one I used to engage with, one I have to engage with for work reasons) where there's one person who does this, and I stayed away as much as possible because of that opinion-domination which happened there.

I don't see that on HN, and it's one of the reasons I like coming here, maybe twice a day.

Moderation is the key to community building, and HN has the best.

Hackers want a page that refreshes close to as fast as Ctrl-R in their editor.

Forums discouraged low effort postings and branching shitposting.

On all successful platforms such as reddit such content is quiet literally encouraged. It takes very little effort to just throw in a one-liner that's kinda funny and press comment, and lots of people are gonna read it, chuckle a little and maybe think of something even better.

Now they don't have to worry about detracting from the discussion, as their comment thread can always be hidden by closing the tree. As such, a lot of people get sucked into it as a form of entertainment. What previously was a discussion with people loosing their opportunity to throw out their funny one liner because someone else was quicker then them has now become an instant gratification machine you could endlessly use, and thus the userbase grew

My argument would be that forums never really had a chance at mass appeal as their format only works with few participants. But the eternal September kept going, so they were always going to become obsolete.

I'd use 4chan as proof for my pet theory, as that's an ancient forum at this point that literally encouraged unhinged shitposting and made it super easy to branch out into new threads, enabling everyone to just respond to whoever they want to (even themselves)

I'm old enough to have experienced various UI paradigms of computer communications over the decades. I ran dial-up BBS forum, paid a subscription to dial-up CompuServe forums, used USENET forums (both in dial-up eventually broadband), participated in a bunch of old web forums such as vBulletin/phpBB, and now Reddit/HN. Some observations...

One issue is that using different URLs as the "discrete unit of navigation" for each topic is very high-friction -- especially on mobile phones and tablets using thumbs to type in URL or the more cumbersome touchscreen copy&paste. Yes, browser bookmarks can help but that doesn't remove friction of navigating to new websites. It's easier to instantly go from "reddit.com/r/worldnews" to "reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive" and to any other "reddit.com/r/<ANYTOPIC>" ... rather than a hypothetical different urls "www.worldnews.com" to "www.explainlikeimfive.com". Going to a different website would involve a different web UI and possibly require a new login signup.

So sites like reddit or Facebook groups aggregate a bunch of topics for super easy navigation. Especially ergonomic for easy one-handed thumb swiping on smartphones. Arguably, a RSS reader software would also "aggregate" content to somewhat mimic Reddit to lessen the high-friction of navigating to different URLs. However, RSS is one-way "read-only" and not a standard way to participate and write comments on each website URL. And no, each website discussion forum setting up OpenID to re-use login credentials still doesn't lower friction enough compared to Reddit.

E.g. Back in 1980s, I learned a lot of C Language programming tips from USENET "comp.lang.c". But these days when I want to see some recent discussions on C++, I just visit "reddit.com/r/cpp". As another example, I was researching air conditioning units and I found some discussions were in a phpBB web forum dedicated to HVAC. I really really didn't want to signup with a new login just to ask a question. The UI friction was too high. Yeah, I lived with slow 300 baud dial-up but I'm lazy now. I want instant gratification.

register, make a thread, 50% of the time it will get shut down for violating rules #7, #15 and #52.

and if you did stick around, there were cliques and resident dweebs with >9000 posts with join date in the 90's. get into an argument with one of those fucks, and you might very well get banned.

modern forums are completely impersonal. I've been on HN for 10+ years, and I don't recognize anyone by name.

I don't miss the old forums at all.

Biggest reason they seem to be struggling? The person who set up the PHPBB forum 15+ years ago has long since moved on and there's very few left within that community who know what do if things don't work. One day it'll die/get hacked/server disappears and that'll be it for them.

- UX surely played a part in it, especially for the oldest of forums that collapsed the thread by default. Then again, Dpreview still has that layout, and while it clearly wasn't successful enough for Amazon to want to keep it on, it still has a loyal following.

- Hiding content—or rather, only showing low-quality image previews to logged-out users—makes the "drive-by" experience less nice. HN—and Reddit, to a lesser extent—avoided that enough by not allowing images in comments, leading to users creating their own workarounds.

- Profit, or the lack thereof, likely was a larger problem. Banner ads just don't make enough profit, especially compared to Facebook et al's in-feed ads.

- Maybe the collective internet just isn't content with the smaller crowds that would have seemed great in the forum heyday that, today, pale in contrast to the traffic from one viral post on social media.

Most people want to centralize around something popular, because there's an instinctive desire to be part of the "in" crowd and that is most often defined by what is popular. The convenience that comes with a centralized service is also strongly desired by most people who have bigger fish to fry than keeping track of so many forums and services.

Also, it's not just forums that became centralized; so have other communication mediums. One particularly impressive example is Discord: Remember Internet Relay Chat? AOL Instant Messenger? MSN Messenger? Skype? Yahoo Instant Messenger? ICQ? Teamspeak? Ventrillo? They all became Discord, both in private and professional contexts. Outliers like LINE and Microsoft Teams only survive out of specific cultural or fiscal clout.

>And in that sense, perhaps there is no obligation to understand the entire conversation to participate, you just react to the OP.

HN is also laid out like that, you are also just "reacting to the OP" rather than going down an impractical chain of chronology.

>If single-topic Facebook Groups / sub-reddits exist, then why is the internet "crowded"?

Because it's still <centralized service> rather than <a service>. Some people hate <centralized service> but have no alternatives, unlike 20 years ago when twelve dozen individual services on any given subject matter were just internet'ing away with naught a care if you patronized them or not. You had options, today you don't.

One of the reasons I saw on the forums I am on is that they took too much time to move to image previews. Many PHPBB do text very well, but with social media I got used like almost everyone else to see an image preview for the text or topic discussed. Everything material will benefit for a good preview picture. Alas, most forums are stuck with outdated thumbnail size previews, while the rest of the internet has move to cards as a proven format.

Reddit and HN are what killed forums for me. These two sites allow for branching discussions. You can comment on follow-ups to the main post, and other people can do the same. It's like being in a crowd of people discussing a topic and you can move around and talk to different people.

Forums force you into a serial, sequential form that I feel stifles conversation. It can work if there are only a few people, but it feels like a guided discussion where only one person can talk at a time.

Absolutely yes.

> no obligation to understand the entire convo

Definitely part of Reddit's appeal. Thread derailment is no longer as big of a threat when off-topic trees can be collapsed.

Likewise, there's no one to get pissy if you force the topic to return to the OP instead of engaging in the latest sub-topic.

> FB groups & subreddits

Both act as subsections of an everything forum. No need to make new accounts for each community.

In the world of audio and music production forums like KVR, GS,ASR, and DOA are as popular as they've ever been. I'm active on VI-Control and the forum has been steadily growing for the past years.

And yet. There's something to the idea. Something very "art project"-esque where certain web pages were only available when you're physically in a specific area could be fun, at first. Could also be incredibly restrictive.

5 years ago I would have considered it near impossible, nowadays I look everywhere else first. Specialized shops put more thought into their product selection than "anything I can dropship" and compared to modern Amazon it's far easier to find something resembling quality. They may be more expensive but in my experience paying 70 bucks once to a trustworthy vendor ends far better than paying $20-30 three times on Amazon because in reality it's always the same $5 Aliexpress stuff. The downside is that small shops sometimes have a bit more friction in the ordering process or higher delivery costs.

About a year ago I didn't even have a choice: dozens of USB-C adapters I looked at on Amazon were obviously lying about the specs in their product description, I couldn't find a single one that was even worth trying. They all just go for the lowest common denominator and hope 99% of the customers don't actually check (and are probably right, sadly). A local shop meanwhile had exactly one adapter of that kind with datasheets on the manufacturer's website and it worked.

Maybe what we need is a range of small hipster specialty shops and cafés etc.