Make forums great again please
I see this sentiment a lot here but people don't seem to understand why reddit "won." You essentially have access to thousands of forums without having to maintain an account on each of them. You may see this as a feature not a bug but given the popularity of reddit, I'd say most people disagree.
They were also extremely juicy targets, not only from a "steal a bunch of emails and password-hashes" angle, but to spam with links for SEO-purposes. I think this constant attrition is what ultimately killed them. It simply became untenable for one person to stem the tide. Reddit lives because it has the economies of scale on its side.
I recall in the old days there were a few services that would do hosted forums, but nobody seemed to think "hey, let's combine them under one hood and ebable discovery."
Forums, for reasons we could go into, just never were as compelling to most people as Reddit's solution, though they are good for other things.
Discussion:
For that to happen, someone's going to need to write some great (and ideally open-source) forum software -- something that's as engaging to use as the centralized alternatives like Reddit and Discord. Most of the classic forum packages like phpBB have fallen by the wayside; more modern solutions like Discourse or Invision fail to hit the mark for various reasons.
With forums you sometimes have threads of over 100 pages that started in 2015 or older where people are still talking about the same thing and newcomers can diagonally read through the pages and see the progress of something.
It's true there is a need for a programming focused community that is outside reddit. Reddit host objectively depraved material along with scientific or programming subs, and has been caught spreading revenge porn or grooming minors multiple times. Never used discord.
Unfortunately it's a single point of failure and randomly entire types of subređdit are banned and disappear forever a recent example that springs to mind were the "sporetrading" mushroom ones, some 12+years old guttednowhosting none of the same content although the topic is only legally restricted in 3 states.
So it goes.