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Discourse, open source, is probably the most mature platform for tight communities. One issue with Discord is that it can't be search indexed, but Discourse is more similar to a forum and can be indexed (if public). https://www.discourse.org/

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the discourse forum software is awful from a user experience perspective unfortunately, having been victim to multiple migrations from older traditional forum software to it.

What do you dislike about it?

Infinite scroll, takes over ctrl-f, bad handling of subforums ("categories" were made for this purposes but ended up being extremely clunky). Then there's the visual design aspects, huge amounts of wasted screen space (depending on your aspect ratio, 1/3 of the screen width is taken up by a bloody scroll bar), lack of clear separations in the UI.

I've stopped using discourse forums so i'm forgetting a lot of the complaints i would have while using them.

Those are all pretty legit!

I see the opposite, older traditional forums are pain to use.

I wish it was federated in a Mastodon fashion, that would remove most of the hassle and cost of migration

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