The tree of: Groups > Threads > Messages is a forum.

Forums have had private forums, public forums, paid forums, encrypted, shared, only trusted device networks, for everyone, federated.

My point is that this isn't new, and that's a good thing.

It resonates, "it clicked", because it's something we recognise.

When we recognise something then we can also tap into the deep history and learn from the possibilities of that and also reflect on how they failed at times (against social media).

I love forums, I would love to see forums become the predominant form of messaging again. Forums yield slower and richer conversations between groups as small as a few people or as large as hundreds of thousands.

Calling it what it is helps access the past and peer into the future.

The big problem with forums are when threads became too long. Either because people go off-topic, or just because the thread has been going on for months / years.

If they could somehow fix that issue, that would be awesome.

I personally don't think that's an issue.

The same number of messages are made, why arbitrarily force the discussion to be broken up? Embracing what the users want to do, how they want to us it, is a great way to discover non-obvious uses and to be low friction for them.

Just looked, and on one of the forums I run there's a thread with more than 130K replies https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/133015/ and so long as it loads fast and people are enjoying it, it's fine.

I just think that monster threads are hard to skim if you haven't been following them from the beginning. On big forums, I'll go through the list of threads to see if there's something interesting. The thread titles make it easy to skip stuff I am not interested in.

If there's a thread with 100 pages the title probably says little about the topic. There's probably some interesting comments in there, but I don't want to go through 100 pages...

Discourse forums summarize long threads quite well.