Also most old forums I know were ran by some guy on their spare hardware that could break at any moment or be shut down on their whim, as most eventually got. Reddit is at least bulletproof in that sense, even if the mods go full regard they still can't destroy any actual data and it can all be reverted by admins.
Nobody wants to host anything, because it costs money. Even reddit no longer wants to be the internet's free data dumping ground. Lemmy and Mastodon won't succeed because of this fundamental problem. Everyone hosting their own server? Literally the opposite of what 99.999% of people want.
So what's your solution? forums just die as a concept because no one wants to host text?
TBH I think reddit's hugest shot in the foot was that they DID want to host everything. For a decade the site was fine pointing to youtube videos and Imgur albums, but at some point they decided to bring all of that into the site.
> even if the mods go full regard they still can't destroy any actual data and it can all be reverted by admins.
it can, yes. But will they bother? What kind of sacred knowledge is really kept from some random post on r/pics that was made 5 years ago that got 100k points, especially when it is reposted every few months anyway?
Nobody wants to host anything, because it costs money. Even reddit no longer wants to be the internet's free data dumping ground. Lemmy and Mastodon won't succeed because of this fundamental problem. Everyone hosting their own server? Literally the opposite of what 99.999% of people want.