If a bunch of independent traditional forums was such a compelling experience, you have to ask yourself why Reddit was so successful despite them. The hay day of even large forums like Neogaf and SomethingAwful has also passed.
The reality is that registering to N forums to discuss M topics isn't very compelling. And even a large forum with a diverse off-topic section can't compete with the long tails of Reddit subreddits where people can come together to make a forum on any topic at any time with zero friction participation.
So traditional forums will keep losing to something like Reddit in the future just like they did in the past, though they still have their own niche.
One thing that’s different today is authentication options. Modern APIs (eg WebAuthn), Oauth, passkeys, WebID… Also password managers were not as ubiquitous as they are today.
I think there’s the potential to make using many different sites a lot more frictionless nowadays.
Maybe the only missing part would be an aggregator to keep track of the different communities.
Those technologies may be frictionless for users to sign on, but they're not frictionless for administrators to deploy. Creating a new subreddit is as simple as clicking a button and filling in half a dozen fields or so, plus toggling some checkboxes, and you're done! Plus it's really easy for users to find your new subreddit via the site search.
Just think of what it takes to get a new forum going: purchasing a domain name, setting up hosting, installing the forum software, setting up the aforementioned authentication APIs, dealing with SEO so people can actually find your site on Google (that one seems almost impossible now). It's absolutely dizzying. At least something like Lemmy solves all of this for you, bringing you back to a Reddit-like level of effort.
> you have to ask yourself why Reddit was so successful despite them
No you don’t. The answer is that Reddit started out more as a topsite system than a forum; then was subsidized by billionaire VCs to capture the old forum ecosystem. Per usual as soon as they captured the market they began to transform from what made them their name. It wasn’t like people left old forums for modern Reddit because it was a better system.
The reality is that registering to N forums to discuss M topics isn't very compelling. And even a large forum with a diverse off-topic section can't compete with the long tails of Reddit subreddits where people can come together to make a forum on any topic at any time with zero friction participation.
So traditional forums will keep losing to something like Reddit in the future just like they did in the past, though they still have their own niche.