Something I was hopeful for but seems to have died is lemmyBB. A phpBB-style front-end to Lemmy. I'd like the accessibility of being able to use an existing account that federation brings but the forum-style approach that phpBB has.

Mostly though I've been disappointed in the teens and twenty-somethings. They seem to have, in distressingly large numbers, just opted to go along with whatever they're encouraged to use by large platform holders. There doesn't seem to be an appetite to create communities and define spaces that they control. Perhaps that's just me getting old though...

The Reddit style voting/threading is superior of forums though.

An unfederated Lemmy instance for example would actually be really good.

...and Facebook Groups.

A lot of people simply don't realize that a lot of traditional community, especially more niche are moving to Facebook. There's no even Reddit alternative for them.

From fried chicken cooking, big tree photography, McDonalds toys collector, to local history archiver.

It's harder to convince them here, unless there are Facebook Group alternative for fediverse.

Especially considering reddit is publicly traded and discord is having an IPO soon, and reddit has gone full 1984 censorship.

I have been trying to build a forum recently, but found phpbb really ugly and difficult to customize (even changing the logo was oddly difficult). I know about discourse but I would prefer a PHP based solution I can host in one of my current servers.

Are there any better solutions?

That not all, search engine too are killing internet. They become worst ad time pass. You can't even found again some piece of info which is still here on a forum or something. Google prefer to send you to a reddit which doesn't answer you question than on a forum which has the specific answer and that you found some years ago. It fell like search engine are purposely killing old plateforme even if they are still up.

Are there good alternatives?

I feel like forums really fell behind the times, with shitty threading systems and awkward text formatting interfaces and the horror that is bbcode.

Meanwhile discord handles image embedding gracefully, with markdown formatting and previews.

What’s the next-gen forum system that’s keeping up with modern times? Is there a part of the fediverse that meets this?

Discourse seems the most modern, but not sure if it is open, let alone federated.

Lemmy almost fills it but tends to be too ephemeral and doesn’t handle multiple forums/channels for one broad topic.

Then my so called "friend" calls me a manbaby for freaking out about this. They are going to be policing the entire internet soon!