I spent most of a year on a single forum in 2011 and I have not spent a year on anything online since, which is a sentence I have been sitting with because it points at something I cannot quite name. The forum was for Ruby on Rails developers and it was called (let me try to remember) Rails Forum, or maybe Ruby Forum, or maybe just a subforum inside a larger phpBB installation that a guy in his basement had paid fifteen dollars a month to host. It barely worked. The captchas broke half the time and the styling looked like something out of 2003 because that is what it was. The posters were engineers in their twenties who had real jobs and real questions and a habit of answering each other’s questions in paragraphs instead of snippets. We did not have followers but we had handles and post counts and small avatars that meant nothing to anyone but mattered to us for some reason I cannot fully explain.

The thing I miss is not the technology, because the technology was bad by any reasonable measure and the forums went down often and the search was broken and the threading logic got confused when a thread had more than fifty replies, which most of them did, because the people who answered wanted to be the most thorough and the most thorough took the most space. The thing I miss is the shape of the attention, which is to say the attention that came from being known by a small group of people for what you actually knew, as opposed to the shape of attention I get now, which comes from being visible to a large group of people for reasons I do not fully understand. The forum gave you a name in a room. The feed gives you a place in a line. The two are not the same thing and I am not sure the line is a strict upgrade.

I keep going back to those years because I learned more in that year than I did in any bootcamp or course or stack of books, and the learning was a side effect, which is the part nobody talks about when they talk about learning on the internet. You went to the forum to ask a question and you stayed because the guy two replies down had the same question framed differently and his answer was better than yours and you read both and learned something about a topic you had not come for. The forum taught you by accident and the feed teaches you on purpose, with a curriculum and a creator and a price, and the accident is gone from the second version, which is the part I cannot recover.

The forums died the way forums die, which is to say slowly and then quickly. The phpBB installations went to phpBB 3 in waves and the wave never quite reached every forum, and the ones it did reach got patched and the patches introduced new bugs and the new bugs got patched and the patching ate the volunteer energy of the people who kept the place alive, who were usually one or two engineers with day jobs and families and the desire to keep a thing going that nobody was paying them to keep going. A forum that has lost its admins is a forum that has lost its memory, which is the part I do not think we have reckoned with, because the internet that lives in a forum dies with the forum in a way the internet that lives in a feed does not. The feed is forever in the sense that a copy is always somewhere, but the conversation is not forever, because the conversation is a stream and streams do not have addresses. The forum is at a URL and the URL is gone when the host stops paying the bill, which is what happened to my Rails forum, and what happened to most of the forums I was on between 2011 and 2014, and what is happening to more forums right now in 2026 because the volunteers are tired.

I tried to find it last winter, the old Rails forum, because I was trying to remember whether some specific advice had come from there or from somewhere else, and I typed the URL into a browser and the domain had expired and the parking page was full of crypto ads, and for a moment I sat there at the keyboard feeling like someone who had gone back to a childhood bedroom and found it converted into a yoga studio. The room was the same shape. The room was not the room. Nobody had replaced the room. The room had just been left, and somebody else had moved in, and the conversation I had read there was gone, and the people I had learned from were scattered across Mastodon and Bluesky and Substack and GitHub and Twitter threads that mostly had been deleted, and the unity of the room had been swapped for the dispersion of the algorithm, and the dispersion was not a bug, it was the architecture, and the architecture did not owe the room anything.

A friend asked me last month what I miss about the early web and I gave her the shortest version of the answer, which is: I miss having a place, in the older sense of the word, which is closer to a corner of the internet you could go to and recognise than to a profile (which is what a social network gives you) or a feed (which is what Twitter gives you), because a place is somewhere you are and a profile is somewhere you are passing through, and the conversation at a place has a shape that is not just the shape of who was loudest at that moment. The place was slower and smaller and did not scale, and the place also did not need to scale, because the thing it was doing was not the thing that requires scale, which is selling attention. The forum was for people who wanted to be in the room. The feed is for people who want to be the room. Those are different ambitions and I think the second one has eaten the first one in a way we are only starting to notice.

I have been thinking about whether I could start a forum in 2026 and what it would look like and who would come. The platform question is solved because Discourse exists and it works well and the cost of running one for fifty people is something like five dollars a month. The harder question is whether anyone would actually go there, because the effort of going there is the effort of leaving the place where everyone else already is, and the cost of leaving is high for everyone except the people who already feel displaced, which is a small set and not a representative set, and a small set is the only thing a forum needs to stay alive. I think it can still work. The forums that have survived in the niches I care about — the writers’ forum, the DBA forum, the long-form podcast forum — are doing fine in 2026 precisely because they were doing the thing the algorithm is bad at, which is being a slow room of people with a shared curiosity and no economic incentive to betray it.

I want to say something stronger than nostalgia, which is that a forum is a structural argument about how humans should learn to talk to each other online, and the structural argument is: a small room, a known group, a slow conversation, no ranking, no engagement metric, just the room. The argument lost in the early 2010s and I think it is starting to come back, not because the algorithm has changed (it has not) but because the people who have lived under the algorithm long enough have started to want the room back. The forum is waiting. So are we.

I keep the URLs of two forums I loved in a notes file called SAVED, because I will not let the parking page win. They are the closest thing I have to old addresses.

Send me a forum you wish still existed. I am @troysk704.