We would consider it if it has the blocklist function removed. Whether the fork gets ongoing maintenance is a concern though.

Thanks for your work uncovering this. Imposing this broad and undisclosed censorship upon the user is unacceptable, so we have stopped hosting Tesseract on our instance.

Lemmy can certainly be used like an old school forum with federation disabled in the settings. The developers even made a phpBB-like front-end for it: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB