This brings me to the following question:
Are there volunteers among you who'd like to contribute by assuming the role of administering and moderating of such a forum?
If there is demand for such a forum and someone takes the lead, I might sign up as "backup moderator" or "second tier moderator" (is there such a thing ?). I'm quite opiniated on a number of subjects though so that may conflict with the need to be a neutral observer...!
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Self-hosting wise, Fossil takes just a few minutes to setup but looks ultra spartan (see e.g. their forum here : https://fossil-scm.org/forum/forummain ) which is a probable deal breaker I guess, compared to modern-looking chat/forum/wiki's. But if someone feels like looking into its "skins" feature, doing deep CSS styling to make it look good, and that ends up being good enough to attrack a crowd... Then that buys whoever goes this way a free-as-in-beer/speech service, hosted either on chiselapp or even self-hosted by someone with a permanent internet connection.
Cedric