Sick of Social Media? Here’s Why You Should Join a Forum

In the before times, when you wanted to hang out with other people online there was no Facebook or Instagram. Instead we hung out on forums in our cosy little corners of the web. While everyone and their dog has a social media account these days, those forums are still around and I think they might actually be better.

Driven by algorithms, filled with bots and engagement bait, absolutely stuffed with misinformation, and maybe even more likely to make you depressed than happy, social media is not a fun place to be for many folks.

One of the biggest problems that I think social media have that makes it so exhausting is the sheer size of them. Facebook has over three billion users and being on that platform is an exercise in information overload. Endless, doom-scrolling through content generated by all the other users on the platform is a recipe for being overwhelmed. When one of your posts gets traction outside your usual circle, you’re virtually guaranteed to have a few bad interactions. That sort of thing will grind anyone down eventually.

Forums Are Better for Community and Conversation

Forums are small communities, at least in comparison to social media behemoths. They offer a better environment to build quality personal relationships with other people. Unlike general social media, forums usually have a formal structure and an overall purpose. General socialization usually happens in a designated part of the forum.

People who come to a forum usually have a shared interest already, so you’re also much less likely to draw the attention of a random person who just doesn’t get what your community or subculture is all about.

Good forums live and die by the quality of their moderators and their rules. While platforms like Facebook and X have broad rules for community safety, (and they try to enforce it with some human and some automated solutions) it’s a losing battle. The sheer size of social media sites makes this impractical.

While you can’t afford to be too comfortable, even on a forum, the dynamics of these smaller communities are much easier to handle, and getting help is faster and easier if you trust the moderators, and they have a history of doing their jobs.

Forums Let You Say as Much (or as Little) as You Want

X limits you to a few hundred characters (unless you pay) and on Facebook you can write longer tracts, but it can be hard to keep track of where you said what to whom. With forums, you can usually see an organized record of your topics and replies, and it’s all constrained within a topic structure as decided by the forum’s owners and operators.

You can have conversations that span weeks or months, with more depth than anything you’ve encountered on social media. If you’ve been unsatisfied with the depth of discussion on social media, forums are the way to go.

Forums Invade Your Privacy Less

Social media platforms have been chipping away at online anonymity for years now, and most people expose plenty of their personal information as a result. Add to this, your personal information is the main thing these platforms are interested in. After all, these platforms are driven by advertising revenue, so it’s not the best situation if you care about privacy.

WIth most forums, on the other hand, anonymity is not only allowed, it’s encouraged. You can join with a burner email, use an alias, and keep your real identity a secret. While for some, that’s a license to misbehave, on a well-run forum malcontents are booted soon enough.

You may even find some forums that are private, and can’t be read by those who aren’t members. This prevents your posts from being crawled by search engines and other web crawling services.

You Can Start Your Own Forum

Despite there being so many forums out there on the web, there’s a chance that you won’t find exactly what you’re looking for. However, unlike a social media platform, you can in fact just start your own forum. Reddit is perhaps the largest forum platform, and you can create your own “subreddit” and even make it private.

If you have a budget to pay for hosting, you can use a hosting service that supports forum platforms like phpBB, bbPress, MyBB, etc. Website creator and hosting platform Wix also offers a forum plugin that lets you create a space to gather like-minded people without needing any particular technical knowledge.

The internet can still be a great place to connect and engage with people, it’s just that social media may have created the impression that they’re the only game in town. If that’s making you feel a little empty and unsatisfied, becoming a forumite might be the answer.