@beardalaxy
I've always been more of an imageboard type of person. The fact that they are completely anonymous means that there is no "elitist culture" you see on Reddit or most forums. Posts are judge solely by content and not by the users. You may get insulted, but you don't have to worry about building up a negative reputation for yourself.
>Perhaps it would be better if it were actually decentralized.
There was (technically still is) actually something similar to that called Usenet. It's a decentralized network of discussion groups and posts and threads were copied from server to server. Topics were organized into Newsgroups which were basically it's equivalent to subreddits. It was popular back in the 90s and even early 2000s. Two major things that killed it were the "Eternal September" back in 1993 where a bunch of Universities offered Internet access which lead to an influx of college students joining without learning the culture first, and then the popularity of the World Wide Web and later Web forums finally put the nail in the coffin for it.
It's still around today, but from what I can tell, it's mostly used for piracy because files are automatically copied to federated servers and media publishers don't bother searching some obsolete network.
If you want a modern example, Lemmy is supposed to be a decentralized Reddit. It even uses the same protocol that the Fediverse uses, ActivityPub. However, the developers behind that project are probably more pozzed than the Mastodon developers because they've included a hardcoded slur filter, but I heard that it can be disabled now.
>I can talk about zelda stuff with people without needing to put up with that one zelda forum's bullshit pop-ups for LGBT shit
Let me guess, it was Zelda Dungeon. They made some retarded article about Link possibly being gay.
I never had any account on any Zelda forum. I sometimes like to lurk the Zelda Universe forums because they do make interesting theories. I can clearly tell that all the Zelda forums are pozzed, but that's something to expect from an extremely popular franchise.
I really hate how forums in general have become even bigger cesspools than Reddit. They are only still active because Reddit isn't enough of a hugbox for them so you end up with the same culture you find on most Mastodon instances.
Even before Reddit, you had forums that would ban you for merely dropping an uncensored F-bomb. Seriously, forums had some of the worst moderation policies around. People were expected to act like they are participating in a school discussion board. It's part of the reason why sites like Reddit got popular because they didn't have this restriction.