I've been flirting with the idea of starting a forum community on UX design. Part of the reason is because I simply love open source projects and tinkering with them and Flarum is absolutely amazing.
But then, the UX design space is flooded with countless Slack groups, Discord servers, LinkedIn groups and what not. Who's ever going to come to an old-school forum to discuss stuff?
Thoughts?
akrimony12 a forum in 2024 makes a lot of sense if you consider all the drama with sold PII data. Owning your own data and being able to take it anywhere holds the most value in the long run.
On the other hand, if a niche is already saturated expect to have to invest a lot of time and effort into growing the community.
akrimony12 I've been flirting with this idea for over a year, and started working on literar.org this weekend which will be a book forum. I will try to grow it with long tail SEO like I dod with other sites and running giveaways when some come in. I believe it'll take some time, maybe years to grow this, but when people come and start to give life to the community it'll become my best project.
Don't give up on your idea, but be ready to grind for at least a year, I don't believe a forum can be made without a long run commitment
Totally agree with you regarding PII & user contributed data.
It's almost like we're currently in the early stages of a digital gold rush and all the big corporations are aggressively harvesting as much freely contributed user data as possible.
Seems obvious these corporations anticipate eventual profitability from our hijacked data.
hackshuu Great advise! Just joined your amazing forum. Love how you've curated lots of topics for a start! Best wishes to you! 
hackshuu Hey, I think something is amiss with your email settings as I never received a confirmation email.
..."Who's ever going to come to an old-school forum to discuss stuff?"
Did ya mean UX designers specifically?
Tbh I haven't a clue what UX means.
All I know is that I don't know what the hell Slack groups are....butt I do know that Discord & LinkedIn are among the worst SM trash fires I've ever seen.
Discord is just completely unusable for a computer-retard such as myself... and LinkedIn....
geezuz cripes that is an uber dodgy platform. Almost comparable to FarceBook.
Nonetheless, of course it makes sense to launch a forum in...ahh, whatever year it is right now.
Problem is, most common forum are terrible.
Yet primarily here I mean the way they're administered.... with that overwhelmingly being by dysfunctional powertripping imbeciles.
I'd say Reddit and Discord are the two main competitors to forums these days. I didn't even know Slack had public servers, always thought it was more of a private thing.
It's tough, you really have to have a niche that your forum would cater to that isn't already being done. UX design seems like too broad of a topic, and r/UXDesign has 153k members in it currently.
However, if you provided something in addition to the forum alone, it would give your community a reason to congregate there. For example, my website jkhub.org is a forum but our main service is hosting mods. People mostly come to download mods, but it has had a fairly active forum community in addition to it for the last 11 years. Though since it is a gaming community, Discord has decimated our activity over the last few years. But it still has its purposes.
Forums need to still exist. The amount of information being gatekept behind these private sources like Discord, Slack, Telegram, Facebook groups, etc. is going to be the death of search engines as well. Majority of people search "reddit" in their search queries to get actual helpful info from real people rather than sponsored articles, and now Reddit itself is going to have an exclusive contract with the highest paying search engine meaning their content will be gatekept too.
Bottom line, yes, it does make sense, but it takes a lot of work to draw people into it and even more work to keep them around.
People show interest and spend time in areas they want to benefit from, learn about, and communicate with. Other than that, forums have no appeal.
