i don't think "going back to forums" would work, really. notably, the thing about forums is that the shame of starting a new thread or topic on a forum is maybe about as far removed from the beauty of capital-P Posting as it can be. yeah, it's great for Discussion, but there's a whole ecosystem of microfiction, and not in the like. ctrlcreep philosopod "decay is an extant form of life" tweet way, in the like. "here is a post. it is a magic circle unto itself." way. "moon's haunted" is a piece of microfiction
and that just doesn't really gel with forums. a thread is a long, rambling thing. a post is atomic, a building block, again, it's its own magic circle. it's the ability to shoot off a post and let it die and let it just fall back into a chronological timeline. it's simultaneously a journal, a forum topic, both an open mic and the heckling crowd.
i grew up on forum-like sites, these sites that existed in the grey area between imageboard and forum. and they're still kicking. they're bad sites run by free speech extremists that enable pedophiles to do their thing, i learned this the hard way at 14. but like, the vocabulary of online socialization has just fundamentally changed. you know what that forum has now? it's a topic for posting like it's twitter, stickied at the top of the board. they'd rack up about a thousand replies over 6-7 months and they'd lock it and make a new one, since the software struggles around ~500 posts.
that's a thread for just dropping in and saying how your day's going. and well, it's only really viable because that's a site that has maybe 40 core users left, if i am being generous, and not counting myself, since despite racking up 10,000+ posts in a year, i haven't posted at that pace in over a decade.
but just checking in, the topic with the most views on the front page has been visited 132 times, and it's from 2017. the new threads have maybe 5 replies, and it goes like this:
OP: wow. james earl jones died.
Reply A, from a poster who only ever posts one specific image of the 9th doctor: (that one specific image of the 9th doctor)
Reply B: i dont give a fuck
Reply C: huh. could have sworn he was already dead
Reply D, replying to reply A: can you fucking stop posting that same image of the 9th doctor fucking everywhere its really obnoxious
Reply A, 2: lol at being fucking buttmad about a png
drama on that site, if you believe the participants are being authentic and aren't being impersonated by other users who are impersonating them because it's what they've been doing, goes as far back as bianca's smut shack, a website born in 1994 that claims to be the first site you could post on. that is 30 years of circlejerking over the same dumb bullshit, and the only thing worse than that is believing that 15 years ago, they were literally replaced by other users impersonating them and nobody noticed.
that's not a place you want a forum to be, and using forums as a replacement to social media just isn't going to work. as always, the prelapsarian ideal never truly existed