I never really got the distinction. Reddit was just a massive forums with a lot of subforums. So yeah, there's the difference that it's centralized, but that was a pro in my book.

Now Lemmy/Kbin etc. seem to do the best of both worlds - centralized and decentralized at the same time.

So IMO yes, these sites are the successors. Not Discord, though, that's a non-indexable chat app.

If they're successors then the successor is a worse product than what it replaced.

Forums lead to long discussions and to actual accumulation of knowledge. I still frequent forums (vehicle enthusiasts never moved on 👍) and the amount of information that can be found in a single thread can't be beat by anything else. Heck, I owned a pretty rare motorcycle (50 ever sold in Canada, available for two years only) and there's a multiple hundreds of pages long thread on this model on ADVRider whereas I was the only person that ever had talked about it on Reddit!

Reddit/Lemmy just leads to the same questions getting repeated again and again because it's easier to ask again if you don't see a discussion on the subject that interest you in the first few results.

And don't get me started on the crime against knowledge that is discord!

Discord is a bunch of chat rooms - fundamentally not a forum or fora.

Reddit and Lemmy are message boards full of fora, with each forum inside them full of threads which have branching threads inside them, and so on. Their distinguishing factors are really their methods for sorting posts and discussion threads, but those methods are really significant. Old fora had no voting mechanic.

Whether or not life is superior with a voting mechanic is a subjective question, but I absolutely loathe how on Reddit any post that either dissents from the hive mind or is perceived to gets downvoted to oblivion and suffers additional consequences, like how no-one will answer honest questions if the hive has decided that they don't like it. Personal example: I once asked on the linguistics subreddit why descriptivist linguistics were preferred to prescriptivist and was downvoted to hell and back. The only replies were to call me a racist. I never got an answer, and I still don't know. So voting is not the end-all be-all of forum mechanics.

Seeing the words "old internet forums" and "2000s" together makes me weep as someone who was on BBS, Compuserve, Usenet, and Prodigy.

What @Rikudou_Sage@lemmy.world said. Discord does not even belong on the same list.

Good content should not be locked behind a login screen imo...

IMHO different purposes. From highest to lowest content value:

Forums: Topic-specific, ongoing discussion, like sitting around a table with a sign above it saying what it is about (title) and people discussing one at a time, giving everyone time to think about their arguments and speeches. Slow, effective, tends to get off on the wrong tangent, and therefore prone to bashing until someone reminds everyone what the title was. This slowness is what makes people think, and therefore prioritises the accumulation of knowledge. I've seen plenty of forum threads where there was no answer at first, but slowly a proper one emerged. The big disadvantage of forums is that, as an outsider, you have to find the answer deep in the threads. There are now mechanisms to promote the best answer, chosen by the poster or by voting. This helps, but you get the same side effects as with message boards. Speaking of which...

Message boards (Reddit, Lemmy, 4chan (technically), Mastodon, Twitter,...): Focused on a discussion, but less on textual content, more on media content. Where forums are all about speeches and discussion, message boards are all about quick comments. Great for having fun, not great for getting people to think about what they are saying. Adding voting mechanisms simply solves the problem of searching for the best answer, but the nature of message boards makes it more rare for people to create that best answer. High thread throughput mitigates this to some extent, but it's exhaustive on all parts (infrastructure, mods, participants). As a side effect, voting encourages radical behaviour for the sake of higher self-esteem, stifling niche discussions and encouraging broad topic superficial discussions. I have to add, though, that doing this karma stuff like on reddit, where you accumulate upvotes in a giant imaginary bucket, has worsened these side effects enormously. Voting is not a bad idea if it's done as simply as possible, so that it doesn't lead to posting just to fill an imaginary bucket with imaginary points.

Chats and chat-focused apps (IRC, Discord, Whatsapp, ...) focus on small, quick messages. Long discussions are rare, as no one except the active participants at the time of the discussion benefits from finding a good answer to a question. Especially if looking it up means going through a history of short messages one by one to understand the answer. That's just not the point. Chats are literally just that: A quick conversation between people on the go. You're not going to write a proper master's thesis by chatting, although it might help you find your way from time to time.

And finally, the comment sections. This place was never intended to be a place of knowledge creation. It's just a big open space in front of a stand where people can randomly shout stuff at random people about what they've seen at that stand, usually with no intention of getting better opinions. It's just "here's my opinion, do what you want with it".

As Mark Twain once said: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead".

The old forums aren't dead yet. I still visit a proboards forum with five active users!

Depends.

Lemmy and reddit are definitely more media friendly.

I think reddit managed to capture a certain generation of users for a lot of topics, and I think its recommendation algorithm helps keep the user experience more interesting by throwing exposing the user to new groups they may be interested in. Very similar to how YouTube works.

But like other social media, the reddit algorithm also creates a very silo-ed, radicalized user base.

Forum users tend to be older, and I have seen a few specialty forums die off due to attrition and a lack of new users.

I think one huge benefit of forums is the good ones are tightly moderated, so bots and trolls are quickly dealt with.

Forums whose topics where age is a lesser factor, or where non-commercialization benefits their userbase, are lasting longer, but generally they're getting picked off.

I think Discord is more like a media-friendly IRC, which was never my bag so I'll let others opine on it.

The inheritance is not just a simple chain. New things developed, were based on old and proven stuff, sometimes mixed with ideas taken from somewhere else... Every now and then something completely new gets invented... It's more tangled.

But I like Lemmy. It's open, accessible, owned by the people and unites people, the way it works. In that regard it feels like a sucessor of what was before the forums in the 2000s.

Forums also have been used to fragment communities. Sometimes you had to sign up everywhere to join in or even read. And there wasn't one 'the' place.

Discord is especially bad. Everything happens behind closed doors. You miss out on everything that doesn't accidentally happen where you're already subscribed to. And everybody has their small little kingdom and you have to submit to them. It doesn't unite people and it isn't democratic at all. I don't like it.

Reddit is kinda 'meh'. It is/was 'the place' to discuss things. But it's owned by a single large entity whose intentions aren't well aligned with mine. I don't consider them harmful like the design decisions for Discord, but I don't participate anymore, either.

I think the fediverse has some technical issues with scaling. But that can be overcome. Other than that, it's superior to most things out there today.

Feel like lemmy is more like usenet than a forum

It depends how it's set up.

A subreddit is basically a sub forum, and having a ton of subforums can create clutter real quick. But a single thread is often too cluttered with too much going on to keep track of depending on the topic.

Example, say you have a games forum with a thread about Skyrim. That's gonna be pretty useless because it's going to move super fast and be hard to keep track of anything. A subforum/subreddit would be better in that scenario so you can have multiple threads about one topic.

But a thread about say monitors is fine, the discussion moves slower.