That's the thing I'm looking forward to with the evolution of the "Fediverse" and other efforts toward federation/decentralization. The problem with traditional forums was that they were all little silos disconnected from one another; now those forums can talk to each other via ActivityPub or what have you, offering a nicer balance between "isolated but tight-knit community" v. "expansive but highly-impersonal masses".
I don't really think that "every community can interact with each other" is a pure benefit. This is exactly the sort of stuff that leads to "everything being about everything", along with general loud people occupying every space.
I still am very happy about "fediverse" stuff because it enables a simple-ish protocol and working mechanisms for various communities to interact. But I really think that, for example, mastodon.social is a net negative to fediverse stuff except for pure "get people to adopt" reasons.
Are there traditional forums/bulletin boards with Fediverse interop? The Fediverse platforms I'm aware of seem to all be focusing on cloning the existing UX of big walled-garden sites, which seems like a dubious approach. We know that forums/BB's can work quite well, so why not bring that UX back with "federation" (i.e. interacting with outside users and service instances) as a pure added feature?
It depends on the use case. Flat forums are vastly superior when it's about having a discussion (singular) rather than a bunch of splintered bits of information being shared.
It's worth remembering that Usenet had threading -- it's nothing new.
I would argue that a chronologically linear thread with no up- or down-voting can provide a level of focused and in-depth conversation and on-topic debate that is simply not possible with branching threads nor instant chats.
I still wonder if we're just reinventing the wheel when NNTP and FIDONet both solved this issue of connecting the disparate message bases nearly half a century ago.
I get building out to include more features, but it really feels like a lot of what's already been accomplished is just going unused.
Why is everyone proposing a fediverse style alternative over a Wikipedia style non-profit with governance? That way most users dont need to care about federation.
