[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.