Not quite there yet, but I think Lemmy has the potential to be the best of both. Something you could host without a major company involved, but also attached to a wider community. It isn’t getting the critical mass just yet.

Also, yeah, like a lot of PHP apps at the time, phpBB had some boneheaded decisions. Like “plugins” that didn’t use any kind of API hooks, and instead relied on patching the code directly.