Small community forums (low '000s or even '00s) are bot-resistant because there isn't much value in targeting so few people. Kinda like the old adage of buying a Mac because virus/malware makers got the biggest bang for their buck targeting Windows machines.

I'm on a sports team messageboard that still runs on a mid-00s phpBB backend. There are no bots because there is nothing to propagandize about on such a small, topically focused community.

I don't think it's likely. The real migration has been and will continue to be towards Discord servers and similar "smallish" live chat-based communities on centralized services.

The age of small self-hosted forums is unfortunately behind us, and I don't see them reviving any time soon.

The closed-source Discord that has bots built into the platform, that's the solution?

I wish more people would try Discourse, which is threaded like a real messageboard without all the automation bells and whistles.

Forums work just fine. You get to have your own community with your own rules on your own website with your own advertisement. If it helps you can also make your own tools. For local communities they are also amazingly fast.

If HN was a sub reddit I would never visit it.

Those Discord servers, even if hosted by centralized company are community run forums. You can set "your" server to be invite only so you can filter who gets in.

The underlying software is not really important, it's what you can do with it.

As other commenters have already said, Discord has more or less replaced the traditional forum. I'd argue that this push towards small Discord communities has been happening for years now, since places like reddit, twitter, or even instagram are unsuitable/hostile to forming connections. The primary focus on those platforms is content consumption, and any sense of community (at least on reddit) completely breaks down after a sub becomes >10k. My theory is that LLM's won't drastically change people's experience with reddit/twitter, because those platforms already make communicating with humans on them as meaningless and impersonal as talking to an LLM.

Also younger people find forums archaic and weird, to the extent that most people my age (early 20's) that I've talked to about this prefer imageboards over forums. As much as I'd love for forums to make a comeback, younger people are the ones who determine the next shape culture will take and there is very little chance small forums will grow. It's such a shame too, it's so difficult to find good Discord servers and so much technical knowledge is unindexable and will most likely be lost forever once Discord stops burning money for growth.

What does this have to do with the post? These aren't generated AI comments.

There have also been (possibly AI-generated) comments that are simply rephrasing prior comments or even comments on the same post and piggybacking onto an already upvoted comment. It's not as common as the straight copy and paste comments but it is obvious by the same limited user history and rephrased comments that don't quite make sense in context.