[EntrePrescott]

small specialized forum sites (like they were the norm in the days before big centralized social media) - much as I too prefer them to big centralized social networks - do have some big pain points though that are why they lost web share to big social media: isolation from other communities and user account/authentication.

In absence of an easy distributed authentication standard that just works everywhere without relying on centralized big social media accounts, what it really boils down to for the user is: the ugly need to register separately for each of these small specialized forum sites… and they all want to collect data e.g. email address. I've often found myself in the situation of thinking "nah, not worth it."

The fact that many such forums try to force casual passers-by to join with restrictions like "access to documents/images/files/whatever is restricted to registered users" only makes it worse. Makes me hate the site right away and even less likely to want to join.

In comparison, a centralized solution like reddit has the advantage that it lowers the barrier to joining and participating. Of course, that can in theory also be done in a non-centralized way, e.g. federated. But that comes with quite a set of other problems, some of which the article already mentioned for the mastodon case, both for the instance operators and for the users. And federation is much less common among small forum sites for auth than among mastodon/fediverse instances.