Facebook is one of the worst places to build a community. You now have to pay to post more than two links a month, even.

And you might be impressed how far forums have come. Open source Discourse forum now has built-in Discord like voice and video chat, along with real time text posts. (It also powers some extremely large communities with millions of users.)

Oh I agree in general, I don't have FB. And discourse forum is probably what I would have tried too, but can it really scale to millions of active users? The largest I know are some linux forums, but they are way smaller.

Oh yes, it's used by Roblox, Blizzard, Unity, Epic, etc. Often the big companies remove the branding, but it's Discourse under the hood.

> what real choices of owned plattforms besides old school forums are there?

ActivityPub, AT Protocol, Nostr, to name a few.

And what thriving communities build up on those protocols?

Close-knit ones, the sort that don't trade principles for outreach.

Bully on me for expecting narcissists to grow a spine.