[ExBritNStuff]

A forum dedicated to a single topic is certainly getting less common, yes. I remember the Good Old Days(tm) of finding the best forums for whatever topics you were interested in. These days it's just old.reddit.com/r/whatever. I guess it makes it easier to find things, but less interesting and exciting.

[subway]

I'm not convinced they're getting less common. If anything, it feels like new online communities keep popping up for various hobbies. It's just really easy to miss the communities unless you have a reason to join them.

Pinball is a personal hobby of mine, and there's no shortage of active forums -- Pinside, Tilt Forums, even rec.games.pinball still sees daily posts. /r/pinball exists, of course, but you'd be hard pressed to find many folks who treat it as a daily destination.

You'll find a lot of similar spaces in other hobbies.

[trentlott]

The problem is finding them.

Back in the day, if I typed in "Radiohead" or "guitar pedal schematics" I would find forums or personal sites about these topics.

Now I will find (1.) Stores (2.) Content aggregators

Those niche forums and websites likely still exist, but it isn't obvious how to find them.

The ones I frequent are insulated from the wider internet. The fact that these places are absorbed into the structure of Reddit is a shame: while it's easier, the discussion is constrained by what is possible on the platform. Static content is difficult to maintain, like discussions of album errata or the history of some circuit.

This is probably just bias for the late-90s.

[2trill2spill]

What? I visit forms dedicated to one thing all the time, like g35 driver, Focus RS forms, or forms dedicated to spaceflight, or programming, or stock or option trading. Single topic sites are very much plentiful.

[gnulinux]

Wait what? Do you know reddit.com? It's like one of the top 5 most popular websites and some subs are definitely nothing but old phpBB forums.