Xenforo is the state of the art in terms of forum software but it's not open source (it requires a rather pricey license fee).

For something on the free end, simple machine forums works on most shared hosts (and in terms of selfhost, it's just a PHP + MySQL stack) and should work for most communities. It doesn't require a lot of technical skill to configure/use, which can make it appealing if you don't want to micromanage mods - they'll be able to figure out the interface themselves.

Discourse is popular in tech communities, but I've always found the software to be rather unwieldy and inefficient. It's a ruby dinosaur with all the limitations and advantages that implies. It's also an application that basically demands the "ownership" of an entire server - the devs are explicitly against running other things on the same server that runs Discourse, which is a dealbreaker if you don't have a good budget.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy is a social link aggregator very similar to Reddit, powered by fediverse. Think of it like anyone can host an instance for their community, and all instances can interact with each other. For example check out the instance at https://beehaw.org/

I use old.lemmy.world for a Reddit classic experience.

There's also a *monkey script for an old.reddit UI[1] (no affiliation).

1. https://github.com/soundjester/lemmy_monkey

Lemmy is fantastic and the devs seem to be actively fixing bugs and introducing new features, but imo they desperately need to build an automoderator.

I've had a Lemmy instance for a niche hobby built and waiting to go live for months now, but I'm not going to subject myself to the headaches of fully manual moderation.

There are a few unofficial repos for Lemmy automod functionality, but last time I checked, they all appeared to be early alpha stage.

It seems like a glaring oversight by the core contributors, and I don't understand how it's not a top priority.

Discourse perhaps? I've seen it in use in a few places; it has a modern look and feel to it at least.

https://discourse.org/

I really dislike this community paradigm. The design, I actually prefer the good old forums like vBulletin or IPB. Discourse is a nice project, but I really don't dig this marriage between forum and Q&A.

vBulletin seem to be still alive for old good classic forums. Maybe phpBB as well?

Throat is a pretty decent open source project for running a Reddit-alike forum, without all the fediverse bloat: https://github.com/Phuks-co/throat

I'm building Shpong[0] with a fellow HNer. It's a publicly accessible Matrix server with reddit-like features. Not quite ready yet, but almost there...

[0] - https://shpong.com/shpong

Why build on Matrix as opposed to Lemmy?

I'm curious about any comparisons you did, or if there were technical concerns with Lemmy or Matrix.

(I hope this question comes across as genuinely curious, I don't mean to snark at your project! I just like reading about decisions to choose one thing vs another)

The primary motivation behind Shpong is to have a FOSS alternative to Discord that's indexed by search engines, not closed off behind auth etc. All the channels can be toggled between chat and discussion view. Things like encrypted DMs or private rooms are also trivial to build on top of Matrix.

I'm just more familiar with the Matrix protocol, having built several projects on it. Activitypub is pretty cool though and I'm working on AP support, so Shpong should be able to interface with Lemmy in the near future!

Very cool, I look forward to using it! Thank you for the reply :)