The struggle is that it takes more than love of a subject to bootstrap a community. I could see someone broadly succeeding by building modern forum software alongside an optional discovery platform that links forums together. I know there are federated platforms out there, but I think a large portion of them have lost the thread of the user journey in attempts to meet the technical challenges of federation.

My vision is more of a combination of the best of Reddit, online courses, blogging, photos, video, learning games, and simulations. More of a slice across many different types of app, tuned to the topic at hand that interests me. It's fun to work on, even if my progress is slow.

Reproducing r/nuclear seems like a nightmare scenario. Lots of arguing. Tough to control the tone and screen out-dated information. It's the classic problem with social media, discerning the difference between reality and myth. Plus, reading through screaming matches is not a fun way to learn.

Aggregating these smaller nightmarish sites, who wants to do that?

That's why the parts of the internet that are "essential infrastructure" would serve us all better if they were non-profit (or a Benefit Corporation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation).

Watching the promise of the Internet get flushed down the drain, I have developed a healthy appetite for paying cash to eliminate surveillance, ads and general enshitification. I'd much rather donate that cash to an organization that is actively trying to provide a public benefit.

I'd rather see a newer Usenet protocol... Say something that also integrates with the Fediverse. But there's no "money" for open protocols, even though companies again and again try to emulate "Usenet, but profitized".

This feels like a longer tail of the image hosting problem, btw.