Can anyone recommend a platform that will help me grow a small & passionate community of users?

Out of interest what was the feedback about bad UX you got with spectrum? Would be interested to hear what challenges you faced here!

Not sure if it's ready but I know @8bit is working on a solution for this sort of thing

A man who stops advertising to save money is like a man who stops a clock to save time

Circle.so is the new kid on the block, highly recommended. But depends whether you want your community synchronous (chat) or asynchronous (threads).

Give https://hittly.com a try. Its is a super simple forum software to support, listen and build lasting relationships with your customers. I built it and also been using it for my own projects for over 2 years now.

Community Software from Hittly

Use a Telegram channel for your announcements and link a Telegram group to it to engage with users

Checkout https://www.mightynetworks.com/ - Looks perfect for your usecase.

Cirle.so or Comradery.io may be worth a look. They are both quite new.

I have a list, it's not quite as tidy as I'd like it to be, but might be helpful - https://www.notion.so/rosieland/92a098dfb19b444f868e622d5fd078d4?v=b56100c6ade345259c001c86650d7fe6

Have you looked into Mighty Networks? Their UI is really nice.

Discourse is open source. You can host it on your own if you wish. Obviously, you need to choose if its worth it.