My wife got off last year. I just use it for some communities I’m involved with and like 10 friends that seem to appreciate my posts.

Sounds more like we would go back to forums.

Good thing most of them will be dead by then.

Yeah, I bring this up because I’ve been playing around with a similar idea of a simple html website for documenting personal projects. My site still isn’t really live, but I have it running on a vm through a cloud flare tunnel, similar to you.

How do you protect your home network?

Not denying that. But maybe we should accept that photos and memes and whatnot aren’t that valuable and limit their size or the volume allowed per user. Just a thought.

Is file hosting really a must? I mean Reddit and feddit are basically forums. And not many forums allow file uploads. Also, we should have retention limits. Low value posts are allowed to fade away. High value posts that have some level of interaction stay alive longer.

Will we need to move to a subscription service?

Usenet?