I don't think they're dying off. In fact I think there's a resurgence in them beginning to swell due to some restrictive developments happening on big centralized social media.
The big friction point for forums is that to contribute or interact in one you had to sign up for a new account for every single one. This is why lots of these communities settled into reddit over time, to eliminate this friction point. Centralized platforms for multiple communities was a solution to this problem, but other problems are emerging from that that outweigh that friction.
Now with things like ActivityPub that friction point might be gone for good. All anyone has to do really is fork any one of a number of FOSS forum software, implement and ActivityPub API or other federation protocol, and possibly but not necessarily put in a pull request to merge the new functionality to the upstream code. Now you've potentially got a world of forums that you can interact with without signing up for a new account for every single one.
I do believe centralization is dying on the internet. The process has just begun so it is hard to see, but even at this early stage I think it is inevitable. And with this, forums have an important role to play with regard to online discourse.
The big friction point for forums is that to contribute or interact in one you had to sign up for a new account for every single one. This is why lots of these communities settled into reddit over time, to eliminate this friction point. Centralized platforms for multiple communities was a solution to this problem, but other problems are emerging from that that outweigh that friction.
Now with things like ActivityPub that friction point might be gone for good. All anyone has to do really is fork any one of a number of FOSS forum software, implement and ActivityPub API or other federation protocol, and possibly but not necessarily put in a pull request to merge the new functionality to the upstream code. Now you've potentially got a world of forums that you can interact with without signing up for a new account for every single one.
I do believe centralization is dying on the internet. The process has just begun so it is hard to see, but even at this early stage I think it is inevitable. And with this, forums have an important role to play with regard to online discourse.