I think the claim that the internet is dead outside of that is not true. I just think that the way in which we discover things has changed so substantially that it seems that outside of the big players it is hard to find stuff.
For example if you google nostupidquestions forum this community does not come up. Even you search for nostupidquestions community it does not come up within the first 3 pages. Since searching is the gatekeeper for most discovery of new places on the internet we find new things less.
That’s just an example of why it is hard to find slightly nice things nowadays.
hisao@ani.social 14 hours ago
It is what it feels like, but it’s not really 100% this way (yet). It is a bad self-reinforcing cognitive bias: we think “forums are dead, that’s why we stick to the sitename” instead of actually finding dozens of still alive forums and going there, in turn sitename gets more populated while forums feel more dead. But there are still plenty alive. Also, there are relatively new kinds of forums which sometimes work very well for their niche, like Discourse communities for example.