Eh, it used to be different. There were tons of forums running phpbb or whatever all over the internet, with decent userbases and varieties of topics. But then google took away the ability to scope search results to forums. And started ranking them lower.

Subreddits, while a genius idea, have pretty much eaten the userbases of whatever forums existed for that topic. Some other communities moved to discord.

And yes, those independent forums still do exist. But they are harder to find and far less used. And the users that are there tend to be fringe in some way (cough alt-right cough).

My point is, it's gotten too consolidated. Too many users in too few places, with too much corporate control. It used to be the only real worry was net neutrality, because the only threat of censorship was from the ISP. But now it's more than just Comcast threatening the internet.