In the good old olden days, we would all flock to our relevant fora to give our opinions about this and that.
Nowadays, the tumbleweed is visible in almost every forum I visit.
Where are they? Is there a secret club I have not been told about?
Facebook has its' place but I am not sure whether all the forums (sp) have relocated to that place.
I liked forum life. I only had two for my Mac, and two for my riding but these places have nearly all but died.
What am I missing here?
This seems to be a major shift all over the Internet.
When I first used the Internet, Usenet was the preferred forum for huge numbers of people. The coming of the World Wide Web changed that, and almost overnight, Usenet newsgroups that had huge, active communities became ghost towns.
Now, Facebook is doing that to email lists and Web forums.
For the most part, it's for the same reason that the Web obliterated Usenet: It's easier to use, it's easier to find communities of like-minded people, and it's easier to deal with spam. All those things were true of the Web over Usenet, and they're true of Facebook over the Web. I belong to email lists that have thousands of users and used to see hundreds of messages a week, and they all dried up simultaneously.
Like it or not, Facebook is the new way that people communicate and reach one another online.