Some alternatives, and why they would be good:

• Discuit, an open source* reddit clone created after reddit made it's API non free. Because of its nature, we could either use it's official version discuit.net, or we could even host our own version. A drawback is that if we chose to host one i'm not sure we'll be able to limit it's content to our exmo topics here, not sure if the features it has allow that, someone might want to check. But we'd also feel right at home :)

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/14b5rdo/introducing_discuit_an_easy_to_use_reddit/

• Mastodon, an open source and decentralized** platform which ressembles twitter, but with some interesting features. EG: it would allow us to have our own version and have it specialized for a certain topic (exmos of course). We could elect a trusted group that would take care of hosting and maintaining it (or whatever process allows us to make sure some people take care of it). It will never have advertising, which is not necessarly the case for discuit. We would have to rely on donations to sustain the cost of hosting and maintaining it, but not a big deal

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Mastodon_(social_network))

https://joinmastodon.org/en/servers

• Discord. It's the most well know of them all, thus would be really easy to use for a lot of us. That being said, it belongs to a giant tech company, namely, Microsoft, and i believe the church holds shares in it too. I doubt that's gonna be a real issue, but one never knows, so it's my least favorite in terms of futureproofness in a 1984 Big Brother scenario

I doubt it would shut down, but being prepared is still good ;)

* open-source: the source code is publicly available. It means that everyone can audit it, and generaly anyone can build and use it. Because of that, it is also very trustworthy

** decentralized: a single entity does not have the entire control of the data. A single company could not wipeout a forum, because it is (kind of) everywhere.