We're blowin Azura's bubbles. I'm sick in the head. I'm on that Balmora bloat. I'm on that Sadrith Mora scuttle. I'm on them Telvanni trama roots.

AKAs:
Lapsed Neurotypical
JavaScript's Strongest Warrior
Fake Podcast Host
Thotleader
Vertically Integrated Boyfriend
Your Fave's Mutual
Certified 5x Severals by the RIAA
Inconsistently Medicated
The Source That Views Back
Carnally Known
The Alternative
We're blowin Azura's bubbles. I'm sick in the head. I'm on that Balmora bloat. I'm on that Sadrith Mora scuttle. I'm on them Telvanni trama roots.
One side effect of feed-based social media is that 80% of the time someone says something like "Some of you are doing X and it's ridiculous" I've never seen X in my life and just assume that it's rampant on the parts of the site that I'm not following. This accumulates until my impression of the website is almost entirely informed by vaguepost complaints and callouts in the same way that half of America thinks downtown Portland is a Mad Max wasteland that is actively on fire due to how mainstream news has portrayed the town over recent years.
Like search "phpbb host" and you'll find a ton of sites that offer automatic setup. SMF is less widely supported but there's some auto installers integrated into cpanel so any cpanel host can do that. Or, hell, the installation instructions were workable for middle school students with no programming experience on shared hosts in the 2000s and that has not changed.
Don't let yourself fall for the claims that this kind of stuff is inaccessible to non-techies and that social media killed the web, you absolutely can still make a forum.
Granted, while you should do this and try it out, odds are you will find what killed most forums: inactivity. For every well-loved forum that survived to the current day, 10 others died because they never got more than 4 people to register and most of their content is the sub forum titles and descriptions, the echos of the community the creator dreamt of when they made the thing.