i like Discourse a lot.
I like that it’s open source but not free ( you pay for hosting ).
I like that they have a support forum where the founder of the company answers the questions himself ( well, used to )
you can host it yourself but that will only make it technically free as hosting will always have some costs associated with it and i would rather have it done by people who are the best at it.
https://www.communiteq.com/
communiteq is not affiliated with discourse but they have actually been hosting discourse since BEFORE discourse itself started to offer hosting …
hosting from discourse itself is pricey …
https://www.discourse.org/pricing
while researching the difference i came across a thread where basically communiteq and discourse were debating each other over whose hosting is best and it got into some pretty heavy details and to me that meant that they are comparable enough that for 1/5th the price communiteq will be good enough for me …
indeed during initial setup i made a typo that could not be fixed on my end and i e-mailed communiteq and about an hour later they responded to let me know they fixed it for me. this is a benefit of dealing with people who have experience with the product - there was no back and forth of any kind - i sent one e-mail and it was fixed, and their reply was just to let me know it was fixed. i’m happy to pay for that.
you can change the dark scheme. go to your profile > preferences > interface. this gray theme is basically medium ( called “Dark” ). there is also standard light and completely black.
i use the “dark” because for the past 10 years or so i been using Full Array Local Dimming big screen TVs as my monitor and those are blinding at night without a dark mode. i don’t like the completely black mode either because when your eyes adjust down to it then you get blinded when you switch to another page. i always set everything to dark gray when i can.
it also makes all the pictures look right too. all professional visual editing studios have walls painted dark neutral gray otherwise the colors of material being edited will not come out right. if it was up to me i would make all background colors except dark gray punishable by death.
with white background the pictures look dim. with black background the blacks on pictures look pale and washed out. with color background all the colors look offset. only dark gray backgrounds are ever acceptable.
but you can change yours 
only thing i miss on twitter is the discussion of trading stocks. the level of discussion of most other subjects on there isn’t high enough to be interesting for me. not that the level of discussion of investing is high but rather that my level in that area is low so it’s high FOR ME.
Twitter essentially made discussion of most subjects impossible because almost all opinions are now classed as either hate or misinformation. And even for the few subjects you can still theoretically discuss on Twitter there is nobody to discuss them with as all conservatives who had anything to say have been banned.
Elon Musk taking a 9% stake in Twitter is likely going to change things but hard to say how exactly. Most likely there will be more freedom overall but you won’t be able to criticize anything Elon Musk does. Knowing what a narcissist Elon is he will probably turn Twitter into a giant cult for worshipping himself.
as for getting this forum off the ground this platform is meant to be elitist. Steve Jobs explained why A people hire A+ people … because if they hire B people then B people will hire C people and so on and a “bozo explosion” is created …
this place isn’t so i can make money from traffic. i pay for hosting and make absolutely nothing back. this place is to have conversations on a level not possible anywhere else.
“conversations” everywhere else are nothing more than endless repetition of the same exact viewpoint. every platform has one viewpoint that is constantly repeated.
Corporate Media and Big Tech: white people bad, diversity good, men bad, women good, straight bad, gay good, vaccines good, russia bad.
Gettr: Twitter bad, Vaccines bad, Infation bad, Biden Bad, Trump good, Trannies and Pedophiles bad.
Gab: Jews Bad, Twitter Bad, Nonwhites and Immigrants Bad, Everything Bad.
there ! now you don’t have to ever visit those platforms - you already know everything you can potentially “learn” there.
it’s just a matter of picking a team and then reading off the teleprompter they provide you with.
i hope we can move beyond that here. to start with i may have to stick with slightly more conventional viewpoints just to quickly populate the forum with content without putting much effort into it but eventually it will go into more original and nuanced takes on subjects and i will ultimately adopt the position that everybody except me is wrong about everything
for the average person their function is to find out what others think and then to make sure they think the same.
for me it’s to find out what others think and then to laugh at them for how dumb they are.
the problem is that’s where i get banned, so nobody can hear me laughing - which is where this forum comes in.
our goal here is not to agree with anybody but to falsify their moronic views.