Where would you start a community for developers nowdays?

The site seems broken.
Also, slack has no way to push new content like fb group can (meaning fb is already installed and pushes relevant content on he feed) . I tried finding community related plugins like "top reacted messages this week" and so on ith no luck with slack. It seems more team/project focused.

Can't say my experience (as a user) with Circle has been satisfactory by any means. In fact, truth be told, the experience would be better, as far as I'm concerned, if the person who choose to build their community on it had instead selected something like PhpBB.

Discourse can be self-hosted and is FOSS. Two important decision factors for me.

And I would agree with you that Forem is nice, works well through a browser, but as far as a general developer community? I can't really see anything "value added", since Dev.To is doing such a fine job with it and without a niche, another effort might just result in a lackluster exercise of redundancy.

I've made other recommendations and offered evaluations here and one can lookup those lengthy treatises lolz.

John mentioned "tools". I think implementing it and integrating the right set of tools in adding value could be something important in leveraging there attraction for any comminity. That might be why I'm often so quick to deploy NextCloud based solutions, and if someone's going to take your suggestion to start with a blog that has followers and comments, Pico works well for that and integrates perfectly as a CMS front end for NextCloud where members can publish their own blogs in an SSO environment that one can start small to begin with, and then add pieces moving forward.

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