i think this is changing. facebook groups was a major threat but with facebook becoming an irritating giant, people are getting out of that ecosystem. niche forums are going to last for a long time to come. after a pretty a long time, i am again pretty hopeful of independent small communities. the problem is monetization.
That's true, but Facebook is going ham with Groups features, Pages Features and Podcast integration for example.
Google still doesn't like UGC much. They changed the weight of UGC in our favor tho during 2020.
Monetization, Schema.org (Supported by Google) to gain richer search results like Web Stories, Step by step guides etc. Accessibility with Audio registration directly from Xenforo and not only audio embeds.
Xenforo still doesn't support PayPal new API's to let us manage our subscriptions better. Optimize the use of JavaScript and CSS to have better Performances. And i could continue with more things if i keep thinking. I really need to open a suggestion thread about this? No there are! Forgotten.
Sometimes i feel "holded back" by the "cost of innovation" on Xenforo, for most of things I need to pay a third party developer, and most of the time they don't follow Xenforo standards, cost a lot, and are slow and unreliable and accept only payments before the work is delivered and examined by our devs.
Develop everything internally is a tough challenge.
People need first party features to be fleshed out, a better Trophy System, better User Criteria, better Tags system. Everything on Xenforo is half baked to let developers extend the functionalities, i can understand some of the features but EVERYTHING is infuriating.
At least improve things slowly but surely, but this isn't the case, things are there but forgotten.
Tons of features in the works tho! But we can't tell.
Effective communication should be the first priority in a landscape like this, where every new forum is wiped out from existence within a year and old forums struggle to monetize their audience.
We are talking about independent forums not owned by IGN for example or other million dollar companies, but maybe Xenforo is going after that market.