Lawyers, platform moderation, and SEO have wiped it out. What’s left is boring drivel whose only purpose is to sell you a product or a course or avoid a lawsuit. I realize some have moved to private groups and there are still sites if you look hard enough. But is that enough?
Federation feels like the right place to bring that culture back rather than let it die or has that ship sailed?
The forum posts have turned into youtube tutorials. Sometimes thats good, sometimes not so much. Depends on how well the video has been made etc. Also sometimes its a bit annoying trying to go back and forward in the video, instead of just scrolling pictures up and down.
I used to be a car mechanic and back in the day the car forums were great, because you’d go to the Opel forum to find opel stuff, ford forum for ford stuff etc. You even had specific engine forums sometims. But now those are mostly on youtube. Not sure how to feel about that.
But for example, yesterday I did a quick search for how to open a Compaq CQ61 laptop and right away found 2 website posts and 2 youtube videos about it.
The information is still around, just need to dig a bit sometimes. Or just ask. I’d be fine with Lemmy becoming a source for information… But everything dies eventually. I wouldn’t expect Lemmy to survive longer than the old forums did. If you find info that you feel was helpful, save it. Either on your harddrives or perhaps upload to internet archive etc.