This is a very different problem than the current Reddit API pricing outrage though. The demographic of us who want a "big Internet forum" is small, probably to

This is a very different problem than the current Reddit API pricing outrage though. The demographic of us who want a "big Internet forum" is small, probably too small to cater to as a social media company. We also tend to be highly opinionated which means it takes more effort from devs (aka $$$) to satisfy us ("I hate Electron I won't use that bloated POS", "Javascript is evil", "my browser should be my user agent", "my distro doesn't package the libraries that are needed to build this app".) I just don't think there's a site at scale willing to hold people like us. As you say, Reddit has slowly been transforming into yet another social media site. Maybe federated protocols (ActivityPub like Lemmy/Mastodon, ATProto, etc) can win out. More and more of my topically focused conversations these days happen on Matrix and Discord. It's much more like IRC than forums, but it's generally much easier to stay on topic and the smaller crowd sizes make moderation a much simpler process. I'm also just fine with folks like us scattering into niche spaces. Our interests are niche, our habits are niche, a niche space suits us more than the "social media mall." (I also do use social media for more social media like experiences, but I consider that to be separate from chatting topically about my interests.)