When you make forums you compete with forum aggregators
with more history and social clout, i.e. a reddit replacement.
If someone made better Reddit, it could have a chance, however
reddit-type aggregators crypronite is hosting their own videos/media,
which makes it prohibitively expensive for small companies without
ads and sponsored posts which in turn make them less of "forum aggregator" and
more like facebook social feeds: mainly video/image based dopamine rides
instead of actual knowledge worth keeping.
I'm enjoying Chatto, https://chatto.run/, which is due to launch soon ish. Open source, self hosting, cloud hosted option, etc. Architecture looks pretty cool.
Matrix/element is the best bet atm. Had a solid 40m users compared to Discord's 140m at some point, which is good proof they can scale up compared to other. Hardest part is convincing your groups to switch from Discord. But you can bridge the two in Matrix and talk between them which might help ease the transition.
Teamspeak has been drama-free at least and spared from bigtech bullshit, but simple things like changing your username havent been working for like 6 years now, it is in rough but ok shape if you want a drop-in replacement. You can freely make group chats and categorize them by right clicking them to create Discord-style chatrooms or voice chat rooms. Otherwise you must pay to set up a Teamspeak community for your friends.
TBH, I hate and have always hated Discord. I'm a tech nerd and it's way too complex for me. Teamspeak worked fine for me... simple channels, voice or text chat if you want. That's all I need in an app like that. Teamspeak seems to still be around.
otherwise irc, bluesky, matrix
- if you need aggregation use rss.
Teamspeak has been drama-free at least and spared from bigtech bullshit, but simple things like changing your username havent been working for like 6 years now, it is in rough but ok shape if you want a drop-in replacement. You can freely make group chats and categorize them by right clicking them to create Discord-style chatrooms or voice chat rooms. Otherwise you must pay to set up a Teamspeak community for your friends.