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The closed-source Discord that has bots built into the platform, that's the solution?

I wish more people would try Discourse, which is threaded like a real messageboard without all the automation bells and whistles.

Forums work just fine. You get to have your own community with your own rules on your own website with your own advertisement. If it helps you can also make your own tools. For local communities they are also amazingly fast.

If HN was a sub reddit I would never visit it.

Those Discord servers, even if hosted by centralized company are community run forums. You can set "your" server to be invite only so you can filter who gets in.

The underlying software is not really important, it's what you can do with it.