Working list of alternative Catholic forums and similar media

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I did not have Reddit in mind when I started this list, because Reddit is very different from a traditional web forum. However, several people have suggested the Catholicism Reddit:


With CAF gone, r/Catholicism is the closest remaining thing to a “big” Catholic web forum. It has been the second largest Catholic web community after CAF, and thus will soon be the first.

If you are new to Reddit, here is a good starting explanation.

Edit: some thoughts about Reddit.

Reddit is basically what you would get if a web forum and Twitter had a baby. The basic concept is the same as a forum: members post topic threads and people comment on them.

However, like Twitter, there are large numbers of small comments instead of fewer replies that are larger in substance. Posting large replies is discouraged by the way the replies are displayed in an indented outline format. Example:
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If your reply is too large it will get partially ghosted and the reader must click to reveal the rest.
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This is probably why Reddit is considered more “social media” than “web forum.”

Another major difference is that Reddit threads are, by default, sorted by like count instead of post date. You can change this to make it work like a traditional forum, but the result is that new posts are displayed first, not last as on most forums.
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Reddit just feels off to me. It is just very different. It feels less friendly and more messy. But there is a lot of good intellectual content. And the Catholicism subreddit supposedly has about 600-800 online users. If that is true, it is about 10x the active usage of CAF.
 
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AlNg said:
Looking around I have found an active and well populated site called
Cathinfo.com

However, this advertises itself as a

Traditional Catholic Forum
A message board for SSPX, Resistance and other Traditional
Catholics to discuss news and matters pertaining to the Catholic Faith.
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WARNING: Train Wreck Ahead. Most folks on that forum think the SSPX are too soft and the OF is completely invalid. They also believe the moon landing was faked and the holocaust never happened. Enter at your own risk…
 
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New Traditional Catholic Forum Just Coming Online Traditional Catholicism
There is a brand new forum just getting off the ground called “Res Publica Christiana” or ‘The Republic’ for short. It was founded as a place online where Catholics can meet and discuss the Faith. All are welcome, but this site leans Traditional/Conservative. I have been a member here at CAF for over eight years, and have been a member at The Republic almost since day one, and I think that there are quite a few members here that would really like that site. Everyone, especially the founders/owne…
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Catholics Around The World
catholicsaroundtheworld . org
All Catholics are welcome to join and communicate with other faithful Catholics. We have a forum, groups for different interests and blog writers. It is completely free to use. It is a growing site right now and there are faithful Catholics on there. You can create a profile and direct message other users. There is a “Single Catholics” group on the site where users can communicate with other single Catholics through messaging. It will always be a free to use site. You can connect with other faithful Catholics around the world. Reach out to me with any questions you have or follow on social media. I believe that it can be a great site if anyone wants to join.
Thank you
 
Catholics Around The World allows users to create a more detailed profile and participate in groups and the forum page on the site. We have great blog writers as well. You are welcome to join.
 
MarysLurker said:
Reddit just feels off to me. It is just very different. It feels less friendly and more messy.
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And people think CAF was too strict with the moderation…
 
You are welcome to join Catholics Around The World if you would like to. It is a positive online community for faithful Catholics. catholicsaroundtheworld . org
 
No problem, someone on Twitter reached out that this is closing down so I wanted to let anyone know before it does about Catholics Around The World. It is new, but has a good community on there so far.
 
MarysLurker said:
Another major difference is that Reddit threads are, by default , sorted by like count instead of post date. You can change this to make it work like a traditional forum, but the result is that new posts are displayed first, not last as on most forums.
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MarysLurker said:
Reddit just feels off to me. It is just very different. It feels less friendly and more messy. But there is a lot of good intellectual content. And the Catholicism subreddit supposedly has about 600-800 online users. If that is true, it is about 10x the active usage of CAF.
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It’s interesting: Just today I decided to scan through the history of comments I’ve personally made on r/Catholicism. And honestly – what struck me was how much more patient and charitable my contributions on r/Catholicism are, compared to some of my comments here on CAF.

When I think about it, and while of course it’s my own fault whenever I fail at charity or patience, I wonder if the difference of influence is structural: here on CAF, it can be tempting to reply to someone quickly, before a thread tangents away and my comment gets buried and ignored by users now having a rambling (and heated) debate about some side topic. Whereas on Reddit, I can actually take time to make a careful comment – because I know that if it’s a good comment, the people who see it will boost it ‘higher’ in the conversation, and the person I’m responding to will see it. Quality, not urgency, is incentivized.

Not to mention, it’s much less frustrating to deal with trolls on Reddit. They just get downvoted to oblivion, while the community upvotes actually good comments, so you don’t have to argue with bad actors ad infinitum under some artificial illusion that your voices are all on equal footing. On CAF, the only response to an aggravating poster is to
  1. Flag them (but if they avoid breaking a technical rule, we really shouldn’t be doing that)
  2. Argue with them (this is the road to escalating anger and ripples of anger and provocation)
  3. Ignore them… and leave their misleading comments to potentially mislead or provoke others.
It’s maddening.

Whereas on Reddit, you can down arrow and then politely ignore provocateurs or nonsense. This allows you to contribute to, as a group, communicating to an individual that their ideas or tone do not, in fact, reflect the consensus of the community they’re spamming – without censoring them out of the conversation altogether, and without having to actually get sucked into a time-wasting argument with them.

Just my two cents; I was genuinely surprised to go back and notice how much less tempted to anger I seemed to be, on Reddit, as compared to here on CAF. And I think the structural element of organizing comments by community up-votes/down-votes is relevant to that.
 
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MNathaniel said:
I wonder if the difference of influence is structural: here on CAF, it can be tempting to reply to someone quickly , before a thread tangents away and my comment gets buried and ignored by users now having a rambling (and heated) debate about some side topic. Whereas on Reddit, I can actually take time to make a careful comment – because I know that if it’s a good comment, the people who see it will boost it ‘higher’ in the conversation, and the person I’m responding to will see it. Quality, not urgency, is incentivized
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My impression of r/Catholicism so far is that there aren’t enough readers to quickly down vote the trolls. In fact, some of the trolls have large amounts of karma from having been upvoted by other trolls in previous posts.

Once upon a time there was a Reddit-like website called Slashdot. It was once the “big” site for technology nerds and it had so many users that getting a link from Slashdot would cause a website to go down. One of the reasons why Slashdot declined was that it used the same karma system that Reddit does, where a user accumulates karma from their upvotes. Users with large amounts of karma could then troll with impunity because downvotes would have no effect on them because of their karma. Trolls would band together into cliques to upvote each other and then they would pillage the legitimate discussions.
 
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Oh definitely, it depends on the individual threads.

I haven’t personally commented on Reddit in months. When I did, it was to respond to specific threads I knew I could specifically help with. Maybe that’s part of it too. I avoided chiming in on Reddit threads that I thought were childish or clearly a mess. So some self-selection going on there (although I don’t know why I’d show better thread-selection there than here. But seems like maybe I did, and wasn’t as tempted to chime in where it wouldn’t be helpful).
 
MNathaniel said:
I avoided chiming in on Reddit threads that I thought were childish or clearly a mess. So some self-selection going on there
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If you’re sorting by anything other than upvotes, you will find some very disturbing and scary threads. Right now there is someone there talking about doing something very bad (let’s not discuss what it is) and it is getting a lot of upvotes. This person clearly needs help from a real person, not a bunch of web strangers.

I’m not sure that I can tolerate Reddit for much longer.
 
Yikes. Yeah, as mentioned I haven’t commented there myself in months (was only reviewing my comment history today, not actually posting).

Not tempted to make Reddit posts right now any more than join another forum, really. One thing with Reddit is I think it over-represents teenaged boys (especially, foul-mouthed teenaged boys), and while the Catholic Reddit spaces are somewhat better than other parts of Reddit, they’re still… a bit too teenaged-boy-y for my personal preference. Basically the role I always ended up in over there was helping younger people with common sense or basic life advice stuff. The only reason I really continued commenting at all (for the length of time I did) was that so many reached out to me privately, thanking me for adding something to the conversation that they felt had really helped them. You get a sense over there of young people with little guidance, and you don’t want to leave the blind leading the blind.

It really depends on the thread though. There are proper adults and priests and so on there, as well. There are sort of sub-communities. At this time I’m just entrusting the young people over there to the priests and adults already there.
 
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