[bovermyer]

I mod three niche communities on Reddit. Two are for sites I own and run, and the third is for TTRPG generators. I made the first two private with no intention of making them public again. The third I'm not comfortable making unilateral decisions on, so I'm just un-modding myself for it.

Now I'm considering starting up old-school forums to replace the first two subreddits. It would be a lot of work to manage them over time and I'm not sure that's the best use of my time. However... they would be communities fully under my control.

Decisions, decisions.

[taylodl]

Fully under your control and fully on your dime. Your traffic may be low enough where it's not all that expensive. But it is on your dime.

Then again, that appears to be the future of Reddit, doesn't it? I've never created a subreddit but from what I've been able to gather you all are using tools to assist with your moderator duties and now those tools are going to have to pay Reddit for API access, meaning soon enough you're going to be paying for using those tools.

Either way it looks like you're going to have to pay. It's going to be a question of how much are you going to have to pay and how much freedom of control you'd like.

[bovermyer]

I already have infrastructure that it could be put on. Assuming the traffic remains low, that doesn't worry me.

I've decided to go ahead and do it. Now I'm looking at my options. Flarum and Lemmy seem reasonable.

[chrisnight]

Lemmy apparently has controversy with its developers, with Kbin being given as the alternative. So you could look into Kbin aswell.