Currently I'm looking at lemmy.ml. It has its issues, but they removed the hardcoded "slur filter" awhile back, and the UI is imo reasonable for non-technical users. Bonus points for being decentralized.
I think getting this particular community onto a private Discourse server would be a heavy lift, and I'm not eager to add a server for 10k DAU's to my AWS bill. Imo Discord is a non-starter, for a variety of reasons.
It's unfortunate that no substantial competitor to reddit is currently available. I would really like to see an alternative for those of us with niche communities. And it would be doubly great if reddit.com kept all the "outrage porn" that hits their front page, which seems to be what they're optimizing for anyway.
For as many years as so many of us have been watching reddit's continual decline, it seems like a site that hosts small communities and offers similar functionality should have arisen by now. I think there are a lot of moderator-types such as myself who value the opportunity to serve our respective communities and would be happy to send a few dollars a month to a site that offered reddit-style forum hosting in order to provide a place online for people to gather and exchange information.