Not sure if serious. 😑

Anyway, before forums, there was a network of servers hosting discussions and to some extent file sharing.

The modern version of Usenet is pretty focused on file sharing and mostly so on paid servers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#:~:text=Usenet%20is%20a%20set%20of,which%20is%20potentially%20widely%20distributed.