I was a moderator on a bunch of forums about 20 years. There was a whole network of them, about 10 or so. All the guys who ran the various ones were friendly with each other and helped out moderating each others boards. Every single one of them shut down as Facebook took over. I made a Facebook group to preserve some of the membership of the finial one that shut down. We had spoken via that forum nearly every day for over a decade. Facebook just wasn't the same. There were rarely any posts and it basically died out completely. Some of it could have been due to age and people just having other priorities in their lives, but I don't know how much a role that really played. I know people through there who I saw meet their now wife, have kids, and now the kids are driving. It's weird.
I much preferred those forums to what we have now with social media and places like Reddit. With the forum I knew all the main posters, while now everyone is basically a stranger good for one short conversation.
It was a bit of a variety. The main hub in the early days seemed to be around multimedia stuff and tech. The guy who ran it was into doing flash stuff and had a media company (still does). However it was mostly general chat or "look at this cool thing" type stuff. Slightly before my time there, it seemed like they had a feud with the Rogan forums; there was some drama and history there.
Off that I remember a couple guys had ones for web models (one of the guys ran the Kate's hoof site when that blew up, if you remember it). Another was software leaks, which was shutdown after a scare from Microsoft's lawyers. Another had a pretty big fitness section on it. Some others were mostly general chat... just shooting the shit, but skewed to different tones, if that makes sense. One guy dropped out of seminary school and had a site documenting all the stuff in the bible that made him stop believing in god, which was pretty interesting... he was also really into making flash audio players.
Toward the end it was a lot of people just sharing stuff they were doing... one girl was a researcher or something who was always posting pics in the jungle with giant gorillas. Another guy was just some punk college kid, but ended up in the military, working in the Obama white house, and is now a lawyer; it was cool watching that progression. People met their husband/wife, had kids. Parents died and they were dealing with how to clean up their house. All kind of stuff. There was always an area for tech support or PC builds, things of that nature. One guy lived an hour from me, I've been to his house a come times. I got invited to another guy's wedding from there, but had a conflict. It was just a little community of people on the internet. The original hub site was pretty big, I want to say 70k members. The last one to shut down was a lot smaller, but we all liked it the way. There were probably 1-2 dozen of us who were there almost every day. It was extremely active... until it wasn't.
The only guy I know who is still running one is for saltwater fish tanks. I'm a mod over there, but don't think I've been there in over a year. I helped him when he was getting things setup, tweaked the logo he got form 99Designs, because it wasn't quite what he needed for all the areas, worked with him on testing various feature of the new boards, small stuff like that. They are pretty focused on their fish. There are meetups for coral and stuff like that.
I much preferred those forums to what we have now with social media and places like Reddit. With the forum I knew all the main posters, while now everyone is basically a stranger good for one short conversation.