People are used to social media, and I think they don’t have the opportunity (or simply don’t want) to change their habits, even if forums are still the best regarding the quality of content, for many, many reasons.
I think the only way that can have an impact (besides social media crumbling down for good) is to communicate about it, share it. You can create invite links from this page: https://unicyclist.com/new-invite
That’s true that Discourse’s default design is kinda bland. I changed the color but didn’t do anything else.
The issue is that there not much free space to add decorations, but I could add a banner with some image, texts and links for visitors and new users.
There are two official components for this:
That won’t help the forum to be discovered, but it might make the forum more eye-catching.
What about like… 3 neat pictures of 3 different unicycling disciplines, along with bit of text?