[bunkerbewohner]

One thing that’s different today is authentication options. Modern APIs (eg WebAuthn), Oauth, passkeys, WebID… Also password managers were not as ubiquitous as they are today.

I think there’s the potential to make using many different sites a lot more frictionless nowadays.

Maybe the only missing part would be an aggregator to keep track of the different communities.

[chongli]

Those technologies may be frictionless for users to sign on, but they're not frictionless for administrators to deploy. Creating a new subreddit is as simple as clicking a button and filling in half a dozen fields or so, plus toggling some checkboxes, and you're done! Plus it's really easy for users to find your new subreddit via the site search.

Just think of what it takes to get a new forum going: purchasing a domain name, setting up hosting, installing the forum software, setting up the aforementioned authentication APIs, dealing with SEO so people can actually find your site on Google (that one seems almost impossible now). It's absolutely dizzying. At least something like Lemmy solves all of this for you, bringing you back to a Reddit-like level of effort.