alt Hacker NewsYeah, lemmy is alright but doesn't have a critical mass of users (and may never have that).
I suspect that Reddit is running into similar problems with a slowly dying user base. The reason I suspect this is because Reddit has slowly started to try and hijack the UX to force me into seeing and interacting with subreddits I don't want to see or interact with. The default UX is now "You might be interested in this because you viewed that".
I've noticed a number of formerly pretty active subreddits to be ghosts of their former selves. I've also noticed a ton of new subreddits pop up that appear to be just a mass of bots trying to hook in real users.
A big part of the Reddit problem is that reddit has made it as hard as possible to tell whose a bot. You end up noticing a bunch of 3 month old accounts swarming whenever certain topics come up but you can't dig into their history to see if this is what they always do.
All and all, it feels like the social internet is just dying. I feel like I'm getting more value by revisiting the old forums. (See ya'll at anandtech).
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its got around 50k active users retained for 3 years from a 200k peak. Thats pretty good retention and its enough to visit every day for its users.
Unfortunately a lot of old forums are now dominated by a handful of cantankerous or mentally ill people. After all, one had to be a bit weird to hold on to forums as the rest of the world moved away. Other than them and their antics, the place might otherwise be a ghost town. Forums are also greying out, because younger people tend to be less interested in a site accessed from a web browser (which they might never use) instead of a dedicated app.
I tried to recommit myself to forums around 2020, and already then it was too late to find the healthy community I remembered from the early millennium.
When Reddit started going downhill for some travel-related hobbies I'm part of, the community's solution wasn't to go back to forums, it was to move to invite-only WhatsApp groups. WhatsApp sucks for discussion, but it's more familiar to the world now than a phpBB website.