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.