Like search "phpbb host" and you'll find a ton of sites that offer automatic setup. SMF is less widely supported but there's some auto installers integrated into cpanel so any cpanel host can do that. Or, hell, the installation instructions were workable for middle school students with no programming experience on shared hosts in the 2000s and that has not changed.
Don't let yourself fall for the claims that this kind of stuff is inaccessible to non-techies and that social media killed the web, you absolutely can still make a forum.
Granted, while you should do this and try it out, odds are you will find what killed most forums: inactivity. For every well-loved forum that survived to the current day, 10 others died because they never got more than 4 people to register and most of their content is the sub forum titles and descriptions, the echos of the community the creator dreamt of when they made the thing.
