@AtlasFreeman@liberdon.com @h4890@liberdon.com If you want something with a better interface, Discourse seems to be the more popular choice, but you are going to need to find a host/server that supports Ruby (much less common than PHP), and it is heavily dependent on JavaScript which can piss off non-JS users. I would still go with phpBB thought. There are plenty of extensions to make it look less like a site from 2006.

As for something federate (I assume you mean something like the Fediverse), the only option I could think of is a newsgroup on Usenet. But I bet most of your userbase won't even know what that is or assume it is something no longer exists. The only other option is an XMPP server with multi-user chats (unlike IRC messages are temporarily archived).