I'm not convinced they're getting less common. If anything, it feels like new online communities keep popping up for various hobbies. It's just really easy to miss the communities unless you have a reason to join them.

Pinball is a personal hobby of mine, and there's no shortage of active forums -- Pinside, Tilt Forums, even rec.games.pinball still sees daily posts. /r/pinball exists, of course, but you'd be hard pressed to find many folks who treat it as a daily destination.

You'll find a lot of similar spaces in other hobbies.

The problem is finding them.

Back in the day, if I typed in "Radiohead" or "guitar pedal schematics" I would find forums or personal sites about these topics.

Now I will find (1.) Stores (2.) Content aggregators

Those niche forums and websites likely still exist, but it isn't obvious how to find them.

The ones I frequent are insulated from the wider internet. The fact that these places are absorbed into the structure of Reddit is a shame: while it's easier, the discussion is constrained by what is possible on the platform. Static content is difficult to maintain, like discussions of album errata or the history of some circuit.

This is probably just bias for the late-90s.

Someone should make a search engine just for forums.

Hey DDG peeps, if you stumble upon this comment: make a forums-only filter!

I pretty often find myself searching <keywords> + forum. Seems to work reasonably well.

... or I could just start doing that, yes.

But seriously, thanks for saving me from my own idiocy.

I've been using this pattern for over a decade. It's less useful now than it was in the past.

I really miss Google's "Discussion" search filter.

Try inurl:forum search operator in Google. Works suprisingly good.

> The ones I frequent are insulated from the wider internet.

I'm starting to feel like that is what allows them to survive as communities. It's a weird balance: too little visibility and your forum dies from attrition; too much and the conversation devolves into, well, Reddit. (This is true even within Reddit: the smaller and more obscure the sub the less likely it is to be a garbagefire.)

An anticommercial search filter strikes me as increasingly needed.

I've noticed that search results in the closest thing I have to a field (linguistics) are usually not very good unless I already know exactly what I'm looking for. If I search for information on some language, unless it's very well-known, I get Wikipedia, Wikipedia mirrors, fake dictionaries and other automatically generated useless SEO garbage, Google Books OCR errors, and so on - if there's anything useful, it's on the seventh or eighth page.

I'm not optimistic about general-purpose search engines, TBH. As the userbase of a search engine increases, so does the incentive to game it with SEO garbage - and preventing SEO garbage feels isomorphic security, except you can't even hold out hope for formal verification.

Linguistics has people who compile lists of resources, and there's enough of a community that if I'm trying to find something, I can ask around and someone might know. Google is sometimes useful, but it's a hell of a slog to get anything out of it, and that's with years of experience in what long lists of keywords to type in to cut through some of the crap.

What? I visit forms dedicated to one thing all the time, like g35 driver, Focus RS forms, or forms dedicated to spaceflight, or programming, or stock or option trading. Single topic sites are very much plentiful.