Summary near the bottom. After more than a decade on Reddit I'm feeling a little done with it. It's becoming annoying to use with restrictions, I can't tell apart some users from bots, and a lot of users are the stereotypical aggressive, self-righteous know-it-alls, which makes it a lot less fun or interesting. Misinformation is rife on here, too. And although it's been happening for years now, Reddit is just overall far more commercial.

I used to follow the "don't go to big subs" rule but not all large subs have decent alternatives.

You might suggest that Discord would make a good alternative but I've used that for about a decade too and while it has its uses, the entire live chat nature of it takes away from the experience.

Maybe it's nostalgia but I miss forums. The personal touch and excitement of editing your profile I've been messing around with proboards out of curiosity and found it fun to play with settings.

The list of active Reddit alternatives doesn't really have a lot of forums which is understandable seeing as Reddit isn't in typical old school forum style anyway, so alternatives wouldn't aim to be either.

A lot of forums I find are revolved around niches (mostly tech) which are great in their own way but I'm looking for a huge forum, something expansive and more general.

I suppose it poses the question of whether communities are of better quality when they form around a niche then grow naturally.

Summary/TLDR

Does such a forum, particularly one with a large community and expansive boards/categories, exist? If not, is it worth attempting to make one? Where topics/boards grow as the demand comes, and the community makes the joint effort to make their little corner of the internet into something bigger.

Of course that last part's the entire point of Reddit, but Reddit's format is entirely different to the style of classic forums, which is why current Reddit alternatives don't really appeal to me. And that's before all the major faults I've listed with Reddit so far.