Yes. Discourse and Forem have been top contenders, but for different reasons. Main points against them both are the lack of federation and 'forum based' more than aggregation style based. (Like Reddit and Lemmy formats). Discourse also has a very strict developer contribution requirement.

I really hope we end up on something with Lemmy/Fediverse/Activitypub compatibility, e.g. PieFed or Sublinks.

The only reason I can have a good time on Lemmy is because of Voyager, which I use on my phone and computers, and I'm hoping it might be possible to get an app for whatever platform gets chosen (and preferably Voyager!).

I was always an app user for the 15 years I was on Reddit, and using a website for Beehaw/Fediverse stuff would be too far out of my comfort zone 😐

i use it to run my forums and it's significantly better than any experience i've had with phpbb. i don't know how much an activitypub plugin would be actually useful for it, given that that's basically a niche for a niche, but if all you want is a community forum that gets delineated into different categories and has a fairly robust user-driven tagging system, you could do worse for replacing Lemmy imo

the biggest downside is that it's not very friendly for low-engineering experience admins, especially if you want it to scale outside of a single computer it's running on (separating the db from the web traffic, for instance)

PHPBB's paging system was trash, Discourse's "infinite scroll" system is only marginally better... from a visual candy point of view; for discoverability, it's still trash.

Nested threads are a thing since email, and there's a reason for that. Even Mastodon, a "Twitter-like", has them. Heck, even Facebook has them (to a degree). The concept could still be improved upon, but going to a non-nested solution would be a serious step back.