Or a traditional forum, yes.

TBH I prefer traditional forums over Twitter/reddit. There are a few I go to every now and again, and while there is way less content, I feel people are way less inflammatory over random things and conversation is usually way more civil.

Reddit should have been a technology, like PHPBB or Wordpress, instead of a website. That would have been better.

That technology exists. It's called newsgroups, it's fast, distributed, hard to censor, without a central authority and based on community of interests. It's also pretty much dead except for sharing pirated contents.

Should it have been though? Something to be said for having it all in one place with one account.

Consider Hacker News. It's a forum that's laid out somewhat similarly to reddit. It has pretty good moderation but in a way that is distinct from reddit. I don't think it would be better as a subreddit.

It would be nice if someone with minimal tech skills could just spin something similar up. Related forums could link to each other, like the webrings of the past lol. That would be the ideal structure of interactive communities on the web, at least to me.

lobste.rs has an open source even engine that I have seen a couple of other sites use