Couldn’t you today make a fairly decent forum technology with all we know today and all libraries available etc? Naive question perhaps (web dev not exactly my cup of tea), but can it really be that hard? Or is that nobody cares enough?
I just started a project with Phoenix/Elixir and I'm really excited about the concurrency and distributed nature of Erlang. I might have to try out making a forum, just for fun.
Nowadays, a LLM could probably generate a new, functional forum software system in an hour, since their training have probably ingested a ton of variants of the same software.
The problem isn't technical, the problem is that social media and Reddit already do what people wanted forums to do, and did it better in many ways (albeit at the cost of centralization and homogeneity.) There is just no niche in the web ecosystem for old-school forums anymore, other than appeal to nostalgia.