Hacker News Reader

I do miss the golden age of forums, before centralized general-purpose sites like Digg and Reddit.

I think the reason it feels that way (I agree) is that forums had real community; I met irl friends in forums, people I stayed close with for many years

The modern day equivalent is probably discord, there are servers with really close communities where everyone knows each other

- Hell Yeah, 2000-2010 era :) best.

- Tons of forums coming from PHPBB, vBulletin, mybb etc.,

Yep and BBS is good too. Like, HN actually only has part of the functionality of a BBS — back then you could post pictures on BBS, download warez, and even play games. It is way more colorful and fast than any other format afterwards.

If we enjoy HN, we should enjoy more about BBS. The only problem is that people don’t know about it.

I think Mastodon is trying to do what forums used to be back then.