[joshvm]

The funny thing is that a lot of the stuff people on Reddit are clamouring for was easily supported by forums, and has been done forever. Admins were free to run their own ads or premium posts, they got sponsorship from companies, organised swaps and real-life meetups. I remember getting perks like free shipping from some places in return for being an active user. The communities were also more intimate. You'd interact with the same people frequently and the water-cooler areas were also interesting to talk about related interests, whereas outside the novelty/karma farming accounts I don't really recognise anyone I interact with on Reddit (though probably in smaller subs that's more common).

I wonder if it would work if there was a good aggregation tool that could talk to old platforms like phpBB or vBulletin (which I think is still a big chunk of the communities that are running). I can't imagine it would be that difficult and probably existed.

[auxym]

Tapatalk is/was an attempt at such an aggregation tool for old-school forums. In addition to aggregation, it offered better UX for mobile. I haven't used it in many years though, I'm not sure what it looks like these days.

[cpeterso]

Who is the WordPress of forum hosting on your own domain and customizability? Someone that can make turnkey forums for nontechnical people to create their own communities.

[Natanael_L]

There's a few self hosting forums, and there's Lemmy / Kbin for federated ones