[danjac]

Before Reddit, there were forums for every kind of interest. Reddit took care of the technical side of managing a forum, it was easier to stand up a subreddit for your fandom or hobby than purchasing a domain, setting up whatever PHP forum software, database and so on.

If all those things were easier - maybe dirt-cheap turnkey hosting for something federated like Lemmy or whatever - then perhaps the answer to "viable Reddit competitor" is no Reddit at all, but just each subreddit go off and do its own thing. Your stamp-collecting forum doesn't need Reddit scale, it just needs a donate button for a few bucks a month, and if it's connected to the Fediverse then people can use a single login or app to switch between all their forums like they do with subreddits with a single federated timeline/notifications to keep them posted.

[memefrog]

To be fair there is dirt-cheap turnkey hosting of things like web forums. Remember those cPanel webhosts where you'd pay $5/month or something and then you'd be given a list of PHP programs you could host. Or there were those various free forum hosts that would only start charging over a certain margin of traffic. Some would even let you use your own domain name without paying for the hosting, but I think most kept use of your own domain name as a premium feature.

You could set up a phpBB forum or something like that almost for free on one of the cheap DIY webhosts like nearlyfreespeech, but you'd need to take the time to install. It would still be pretty easy though.

These things still exist. But people will switch to Discord instead because most subreddits seem to have discords already.