Just bought Waterhole and I'm getting a small amend done that may be useful to work on in the core product.
The community I'm building is private so we didn't want posts in public.
I know you can set Guest access off, but then it looks like an empty forum. Not very enticing.
Instead we're building a "logged out" homepage that looks a bit like the ones at Skool
e.g. https://www.skool.com/newsletter-insiders/about
(A friend's forum)
I showed waterhole to a few other Skool users. and this was their main concern, so it could open up a market that wants a decent self-hosted community tool.
The only other comparable one I've seen is https://once.com/campfire but I like that Larvel developers are in ready supply for customisations :)