I've been wondering about different forum softwares recently as well.

The Lemmy software seems like it might not be developed enough for the size of the userbase. This feels to be the case even more so after the attacks on Lemmy.world which would've been less of a problem with better moderation tools.

I've heard people throwing around the idea of forking Lemmy, but I'm not sure how likely that is.

I haven't used a non-link-aggregator forum in a long time, so I might be biased; but I don't personally like the style of them. I prefer the information density of Lemmy/ Reddit/ Tildes style link-aggregator forums. The ability to have multiple independent comment threads for each link definitely helps encourage discussions (in my opinion).

My personal preference would be for Lemmy to develop stronger mod tools, but who knows how likely that would be?

I've spent ages on phpBB and I do kind of miss out to be honest.

It might just be nostalgia talking though because I can't really say exactly what I'm missing about it.

Might just be the old communities that used it.