Yeah, something like that would probably be the best way forward. Discourse is due to technical issues slightly tricky to host on our current setup, so I previously tried it with Flarum... which got a rather luke warm response from current users (partially because of the Javascript issue).
As a result I somewhat changed my view on this: Current users seem to be either against (javascript) or mostly indifferent to a change of forum software and simply switching to a different forum software (with all the change pain that induces) isn't going to be that much of an improvement that it attracts many additional users, I guess. Hence I am rather on the lookout for something slightly different than a traditional forum, which might be able to attract new users while still work as a replacement for this forum. Federated Lemmy (
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy ) might be just that, but it is still too experimental to deploy and I still hope that they can reduce the dependence on javascript so that there is at least a read only fallback.