I think federation and decentralization work well for email and text-messaging platforms like XMPP and Matrix because those platforms inherently benefit from being decentralized. They work almost seamlessly with federation.
Forums, on the other hand, don’t really need a federated system. Just look at Lemmy and how many communities defederate from one another because of ideological disagreements. When there’s that much defederation, the entire concept starts to feel pointless. Suddenly, you can’t use your account across “Lemmy” because several instances have decided they don’t like each other anymore.
If this much fragmentation is going to happen naturally, how is federation supposed to be the sustainable future of forums?
I think this is a fair criticism of federated forums. You don’t see this same level of fragmentation with email or text messaging.
Centralized but well-moderated forums are what really matter. Federation doesn’t protect good or useful speech, quality moderation does. And by its nature, Lemmy lacks that.
In the current world where most of the forum discussion happen on Reddit, there is little space left for another active centralized forum.
The decentralized approach has at least the pro to offer something different (you can leave for another instance instead of depending on a single corporation for access).
Creating another centralize Reddit brings exactly the same issues current Reddit has (enshittification), and you don’t even have the userbase to make up for it. Digg 2.0 launch was messed up, but even if they managed better it would be very difficult for them to get enough traction to really compete.
Bluesky is better that Twitter in a lot of aspect, but it stills fails to replace it, and the network effect keep bringing people back to Twitter to see “what is happening”.
Vicinus replied in the other comment for numbers.
I strongly disagree, and there are tons of other centralized forums that are doing just fine. They’re not as big as Reddit but some have an order of magnitude (at least) more users than Lemmy does.
There are lots of ways to offer something different, and new upstarts have been able to gain traction by offering something different countless times in the past.
Especially if we’re talking about a forum for the masses with a high number of users, the vast majority of those users simply don’t care about centralization vs federation.
I was talking mostly about generalist forums. Indeed topic-specific forums are still active, but that’s not something OP’s forum, Reddit or the Threadiverse tries to do.
I just checked https://forums.somethingawful.com/index.php , it shows 2,369 users logged in. A single instance like Lemmy.world has 4880 daily active users.