Forums work without federation.

As a community, we should all abandon centralized servers and migrate to decentralized solutions. I’d support any decentralized system supporting privacy and anonymity, something that asks no personally identifying information such as phone number or email address. Something like Bastyon or Brighteon.io . Some attributes are below:

• This solution is directly on a blockchain, has no corporation behind it, much like Monero.
• Plus it’s got many of the features that Twitter or Lemmy has, we can set up private or public groups and memberships
• No email address or phone number is required, so you can remain as anonymous as you choose.
• There’s already a strong group of liberty-minded individuals. While they aren’t all crypto-savvy, they are predisposed to solutions benefiting privacy.
• Adequate settings to block offensive speech, only controlled by the individual, so you can limit what you see, but not what I see.
• Built-in design is the requirement for small amounts of PKOIN, the coin that powers the blockchain.

This last bullet about requiring PKOIN has the effect of reducing spammers and trolls, but does not eliminate them entirely. While those desiring to have a megaphone and upload large amounts of data will have to pay, the average user posting photos, articles, and links to external sources normally have no cost. I’ve never needed to purchase PKOIN and have steadily posted links to articles of interest repeatedly.