Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.

I’m just curious if spaces such as that even exist, and if they do, what they lead to.

I don't know about lemmy since I'm old enough to not care to go looking for that, but I can speak in generalities from a few decades back.

So, I ran an old-school forum in the late 1990s/early 2000s. I found that a complete lack of moderation leads to bad actors essentially ruining the vibe. Basically, there are human beings (and bots plied by state actors in this day and age) that will happily exploit a fully-unmoderated forum and fill it full of awful stuff.

Now, bad mods are awful, power-tripping and all, and lots of regular people who have never run a community of any sort have had run-ins with mods that have the HOA Karen mentality and come to the not-entirely-correct conclusion that ALL moderation is bad, but having no mods can ALSO kill a community if it gets big or noticed enough to draw in outsiders, because you end up with the bullies running roughshod over everyone else, and changing the vibe. And if the vibe gets too gross, you lose the decent, cool members because they'll fuck off elsewhere and do their thing elsewhere because your community is too full of bullshit and crap.

You could simply start your own instance. Nobody can delete your content or ban you there. But get ready to get defederated from other instances.