I haven’t used a non-link-aggregator forum in a long time, so I might be biased; but I don’t personally like the style of them. I prefer the information density of Lemmy/ Reddit/ Tildes style link-aggregator forums. The ability to have multiple independent comment threads for each link definitely helps encourage discussions (in my opinion).
I mean those UI bits could be tweaked, for example - I saw this which I thought was neat https://meta.discourse.org/t/topic-list-previews/101646
I couldn’t find a good example of nested comments on the linked modification, but I agree that it is likely not unique to Lemmy/ Reddit/ Tildes.
Ahhh, yeah ok, I misunderstood.