What do you get when you take a traditional forum, add vote based sorting so that the best post and comments (in theory) rise to the top to avoiding the issue of thread bumping, use a nested comment structure so that individual conversations in each thread can be easily followed, and allow anyone to make a subforum as they please?

You get reddit. (or now, Lemmy) The only thing missing in Lemmy is topic tags, which I think is a nice to have, but by no means necessary.

There is a reason why very few people uses forums and most of conversation nowadays takes place on social media, while reddit and Discord has but all but replaced them. So, replacing Discourse/Zenforo as the software to use for independent Internet forums should be the aim for Lemmy to significantly grow.

Strangely, Discourse’s federation model seemed to be based on Mastodon compatibility instead of Lemmy-like Groups, which I think is a mistake.