It's very hard to ever go back to that. Era's activity is fading and the moderation fucked up too hard for the site to recover. Gaf is growing, but it's hard to envision a level of activity like in 2017 or earlier. Places like GameFAQs or r/games are far too sparse and have no standards whatsoever, and thus nobody big really stays there. Likewise, it's hard to see a new player enter the fiel. Nowadays, discussion (gaming and otherwise) is spread out between a billion social networks, comment sections and such. Discord is where official communities seem to be moving, but you can't realistically have a well-managed general Discord for all things gaming: you'd need to have thousands of channels for everything to be covered, and things would just get buried hard.
It's too bad. May be an age thing, but to me discussion forums remain the best place to discuss gaming. What I'm getting these days on Gaf is great, but the relative lack of activity is showing. If I put the Gaming channel and sort them by time of thread posted, I see threads from 36 hours ago on page 1. Many of us stayed on Era for that reason: there is activity, and on discussions that didn't involve stuff mods were overly sensitive about, we could have great discussions, especially first year. That is what I'm finding here on Gaf, but aside from the big themes like Cyberpunk, it's hard to get enough activity sometimes for a good discussion. Maybe this will improve over time, as other places seem to deteriorate and this one keeps growing.
