I miss forums, grouped by categories and threads where you can pick and choose what you want to engage with. The modern social media paradigm of "an unstoppable firehose of assorted content all at once" can be a bit of a burden
In the modern era, Discord is the closest thing we have, though the sheer size and activity of some servers can make them borderline unusable. Still, it's nice to be able to go to a server, see the list of unread categories, and choose which ones you want to review.
I was reared on BB forums for obscure webcomics and, perhaps this is nostalgia speaking, but there was a warmth to that kind of community where you could show up, see what threads had updated, and choose which ones particularly interested you and where you wanted to contribute your thoughts.
I've quit twitter and pretty much any other social media except cohost, and even here I can only engage for a few minutes at a time before a disjointed collection of other people's thoughts and some massive and uncollapsed thread being reposted five times in a row just shuts off the engagement part of my brain. It's hard to feel like I can find a little corner here like I could on a forum where just a few people would gather to talk about a specific topic. Others could see if they wanted or just ignore it if they didn't care.
Discourse actually has this, and a lot of people run Discourse(I know, I know) instances, but they don't show up as well on google unless it's a linux distro's Discourse forum.
But the Discourse platform suffers the same problem all forum platforms do: They have a 'show me the latest posts' tab, which causes 'power users' to just treat it like twitter in the worst of ways.
the bad old days were also bad, but at least the option was hard enough to find that most didn't. Discourse just puts it right up there.
