PMc We're on the same page, line by line! in three words: human, email and usenet. Meh! there is a situation:
The other day I had a conversation on telephone with one of my relatives, I said it would be nice to arrange a meetup. she said, corona.
This is dangerous, and I will probably soon die from it. I am living alone, there is no one here I could talk to - so I used to frequently travel around and visit certain cultural events (of a rather specific taste ) to get among people. There is nothing of this anymore, I am bound to stay in my room like I were locked into a cage, and never talk to anybody. There was a psychologist who stated that people would actually need caressing otherwise they get ill. I'm not sure about that, but certainly people need to talk to each other in a real way, otherwise they soon get crazy and very likely seriously ill. (Not all animal can be kept in cage. Some just die, for no apparent reason.)
Moving from BBS to Usenet, I understand. Transition from usenet to forums, a mystery tour.
The forums are disappearing by long, already. Many of the special ones are degrading or almost dead, some have closed already 5 years or longer ago. I can somehow understand the transition to forums (more simple for the user, more control for the owner), but I do entirely not understand where people have been moving to and what they use now after they left the forums. And this is two-fold: there probably are new people coming to the internet, with new habits, and these might be satisfied with just clicking 'like' on facebook. But then, 15-20 years ago one could run a forum on some very specific topic, even on rather weird and deviant matters, and there was some gathering of people, and these -people and forums- seem to have just disappeared from the net.
So here on FreeBSD things are really late - this forum appeared when others were already closing. Probably technical support is one of these things were forums do continue to exist: someone appears with a technical issue, and some other know it an can easily help, so this is only a matter of writing it up.
But Forums about philosophical things, where it is not direct problem-solving, but sharing and reflecting of ideas, and where one could express some paragraphs of genuine thinking and discuss that - this does not happen anymore. Those forums did close around 2010 and just kept their wealth of content online - but then as they figured that it cost continuosely to keep a domain online, one after another they entirely disappeared. (I am not sure about other contries, but in german-speaking area there were some adventurous and challenging places that I am missing very much.)
And I wonder what has happened - have people just stopped thinking, all together, all over the planet?
Addendum: ---
Thinking over it, it seems to me that in the current Internet, only those places continue to exist where one can give away money. As an example, say one might be interested in parapsychology. There is a huge business associated for making money, the so-called "esoteric healers" (of all kinds and fashions) - and these webpages have never changed, they are present on the net just like they were 20 years ago. But then there were other pages, which were not focused on money-making, but on exchange among people, to freely share and discuss experiences. And those have gone.
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Email is a major obstacle. Suggest it to people, as an alternative to messengers. First, you hear whining. Second don't expect any reply. Finally, you will be branded as a throwback.
Ah, yes, that happened to me also. Sometimes it sounds: "yes, I have email, but I do not answer them". Or sometimes, this is just what happens. I always understood that as a way of saying <i don't want to stay in contact with you> - which is to be respected, but is still kind of strange when this developed from a meet at some venue with some brilliant exchange and the shared impression that it should be continued.
So, finally, getting back on topic: it might actually be difficult to run a language specific FreeBSD forum. It might be considered too much hassle (or whatever) to participate in such a forum. The larger audience is reached in the english forum anyway, so such a language-forum would mainly be a bit more intimate place - I would think that nice, but that's exactly what seems to be no longer of interest on the net. Strangely, otoh, when we started to use Unix/FreeBSD, we had enough to talk that we did meet once a week, regularly. And that was just us few guys in that city, at a time when running a computer was a rare habit.