I miss PhpBB. So much more well organized than Reddit or Discord or Instagram or Twitter. It feels like we've lost user experience sensibilities from the mid 2000s and now rely on algorithms and feeds to give us things we may or may not want. Hashtags and flair never made any real sense compared to threads and topics.
Forums are still around. Less popular, sure, and definitely a much smaller fraction of the entire online footprint. But if it's the experience you want, you can still get it. I've been on the Something Awful forums for almost 2 decades at this point, and there are definitely others.
