But those aren't free necessarily and they're detached from one another. The thing that's attractive about Reddit is:
1. It's free
2. It's all under one site so it's easier for people to find a new community to join
3. You only need one account and it doesn't require an email address so if you have a one off woodworking question you can ask it without having to register on a new forum
Websites are great for displaying information but they are not ideal for discussion
Blogger is free. LiveJournal is free. There's plenty of free offerings. Taken as an ecosystem, they are decentralized.
> 2. It's all under one site so it's easier for people to find a new community to join
The question was for a decentralized service. You can't really have everything under one site and be decentralized, because that one site can filter anything they want. I agree that people want that, but it wasn't the question.
> 3. You only need one account and it doesn't require an email address so if you have a one off woodworking question you can ask it without having to register on a new forum
Not really part of the question, which was whether the average person can make a forum through a web page.
I think your points have merit, but they don't necessarily apply to the question that was posed, at least as I interpreted it and intended my response to apply to it.
> It's all under one site so it's easier for people to find a new community to join
In theory you can find new subreddits starting from the main page, but it's more often because of people cross-posting things from somewhere you weren't previously aware existed.
There isn't any technical reason why a decentralized system couldn't work the same way. Basically just need a standard way to designate posts as permissible to repost on other sites with a link-back, and then a button on the site that makes it easy to do that.
> You only need one account and it doesn't require an email address so if you have a one off woodworking question you can ask it without having to register on a new forum
Small sites should go the other way and use an email as the login name (distinct from the public display name if you want). Then you don't even have a password, to sign in you get an email with a token in it. Paste the token or click the link from the email and you get a cookie that keeps you signed in. Lose the cookie or want to sign into another device and they send you another email.
Then "signup" takes five seconds, there's no login to forget (it's your email) and no password to forget (it doesn't even exist), so doing this on a hundred independent websites doesn't matter. You don't even have to use the email you actually read, you could use one exclusively for this type of account and then ignore anything that comes to it that isn't a site login token.
Try. My blog got 16 visitors from another blog today.
(edit: it is now 23!)
Won't make me rich.
But it makes me happy that I am part of rebuilding an old style web.
If you write about interesting stuff, post your website below and I might add a link and I don't care about nofollow and all that SEO stuff. Maybe 5 of my visitors visit you.
You won't get rich but you will be part of something.
Seems like that'd be a good way to avoid the eternal September of the modern web. If "normals" are massing on Reddit and Facebook, maybe the wild west of independent websites is poised for a Renaissance?
Not to mention that some subs have associated / affiliated Discord servers- where you can directly chat with those at the forefront of the community directly.