Yeah, forums exist but they have a real hard time growing their userbase these days. It's just more deliberate to visit a particular forum's website, then usually click on a subforum, then look at a thread, and then see its contents. Then you might be on page 37 of a thread and people are all discussing that post from page 33. It's slow compared to something like Reddit/Lemmy or Xitter style sites that put the content right in your face without having to look around.

I'm prone to falling for this myself even as I lament forums growing quiet. But I guess the best thing to do is link directly to forum threads from other social media and hope enough users trickle in.

What I REALLY hate is Discord servers replacing forums for things like video game FAQs and it's really hard to find the latest announcement, bug workaround, or whatever without butting into the conversation and asking (you're the 48th person to ask today and people are a little annoyed).