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I just really don't want to go back to not having threaded comment trees. It's the big reason I left them for Reddit in the first place! But the small forum feel, the sense of community, the primitive/lack of algorithms? Yeah hit me with that shit. I could see a Fediverse platform that does this being workable.

I have fond memories of belonging to Harry Potter forums in my teens, writing forums in my early twenties, and other random homemade forums with barely half a dozen users. I do miss the sense of community, the little dramas, the signatures and avatars, the trolls and the darlings, the colorful CSS, and the overall coziness of logging on and seeing what was happening today. It was really exciting to be on Mugglenet the week before or after a new Harry Potter book was released. And I got some good support on some of the smaller writing forums. But discover-ability was rough. Better as a memory, perhaps.

I have absolutely no ability to read a several-hundred page thread anymore. I think the dig/etc innovation that killed them was vote-weighting posts and comments rather than chronologically ordering them. It gives you an ordered list of things that are worth your attention. Folks inclined to read deeper than that can get a bit of a rush from finding some hidden gems and helping them rise to the top, either with new posts linking to a comment or otherwise.

I think the new way is much better.

TLDR, yes and the current popularity of Reddit may be because it is actually hiding how it is not really that much of a community of people but rather a bad simulation.

My PhD was in this area of how older-style internet forums operate and touched on why they continue to hang around. Yes they absolutely (with caveats lol) have a future, but the mass appeal of the reddit style is surprising. I didn't delve into that in my work but do have an educated guess that could be explored further (hint by someone else) to explain that.

Forums require a lot of engagement and memory on the part of the people who use them. Think about how context is needed to understand any text - like how easy it is to misunderstand just what the hell the USA founders really meant in the Constitution because their world-view is mostly gone. Pick any other old document if that's a little too contentious for you.

Well, forums are the same. They require a community of people who interact with one another so that meaning can be created and maintained. Like you said, you have to read and read and read and then comment and get picked on for getting some minor lingo wrong or for breaking some taboo. Eventually, if you stick to it, you'll become a part of the "machine". Quite literally, you will be hosting the knowledge and processes that make the forum work, just in your head and not on the server. There are some decent higher-level theories that can help give a conceptual framework for this sort of thing. Post-materialism is helpful, so is technological posthumanism. A shortcut to all this is to think of the transhumanist movement in the 1990s. They thought they would upload their consciousness to the net. Well, in a twist of fate, the net has been downloaded into our minds instead. Basically, all those apps and stuff don't make sense unless you have some cultural wetware installed in your noggin and some ability to communicate with others in order to keep it constantly updated.

That's a lot of work and most people don't do it. Instead, they'll grab the simple and readily-accessible stuff. Memes, catch-phrases, "in-jokes" that aren't really "in" anymore. Basically, most of Reddit can be considered a simulacrum - a piss-poor representation of community that requires little effort to participate within. Notably though, at the same time Reddit is full of the kinds of complex and effort-laden communities that I mentioned before. It is just that they are hidden in plain sight. Anyway, gotta go, it's bedtime.