I played a lot of Graal Online in my youth. The fact that the servers were player-made was very unique and gave each server a really distinct feeling in terms of graphics and theme (Personally played on Arkland Empires/AEON and Bravo Evolved).

Playerworlds usually had 25-200 players on at any given time, so the communities were tight-knit and you ended up getting to know everyone eventually, even the staff who were just regular players.

The game encouraged creativity since anyone could become a staff member and help shape the playerworld. Messing around with the level editor and tinkering with Graal's custom scripting language 'GScript' was my first introduction to programming, so it was highly influential for me. Come to think of it, it was also my first introduction to Linux! (Thanks Napo from AEON!)

Backend: Spring boot with Kotlin, openapi-generator for server stubs, JOOQ for database interaction.

Frontend: React, antd as a component library, openapi-generator for api clients.

Database: PostgreSQL, flyway for migrations.

Out of all the stacks I've used over the years, this is the one I'm happiest with. It's very stable, each tool has excellent documentation and active communities, and it's just plain fun and productive to work with.

I've been looking for something like this and unfortunately have found nothing quite like HN.

There's /biz/ which has some decent discussions from time to time, but being 4chan is also filled with trolls, shilling, and misinformation.

Seems like it's a good opportunity for someone inclined to create such a community.

I wrote a platform a while back that does exactly this, had it running for a couple of months until I got bored of trying to manage vendors. Email me at apehx@protonmail.com, it might be exactly what you're looking for.