I am thinking about that time and hosting a forum myself all the time. But there are a few issues connected with it: (1) If I hosted one, I could only do it invite only, because I don't want to be responsible or held responsible, if some shithead posts illegal stuff on it. (2) So it is back to friends only. But my friends do not show motivation or interest in being very active initially in such a media. I would have to artificially create topics and discussions around them and ask them to comment or so. It feels like it would require a lot of initial investment to get something that sustains itself by having active people and good info on it to be worth it for people to interact through it.

I do terribly. However you needed SysAdmin skills to administrate a *nix box.

System skills to run the forum and webserver configuration.

And money to pay for the webhost/vps/cloud minus any malicious actions such as DDoS or bandwidth stealing.

All three are sparse now and not forgetting the laws of the country. UK has become a pain to host anything community oriented.

There is cheap managed hosting for forums. I use one such for my BBS.

What do you use? I moved mine to Bluehost and it's been a very expensive nightmare. There is no mystery around the death of forums.