There have been discussions along these lines within the community before but it never progressed beyond the suggestion for a couple of reasons:

Our format is unlike other history blogs or outreach projects because it is driven by the format of having a community of people asking questions. We do not write blog posts about subjects we feel the public needs to know about (we do on a limit scale but you know) but rely on a direct interaction with the public. In order for this work we do need an audience, which reddit provides solely out of the fact that people come to this site for a wealth of content (from cat pictures to porn) and also use our forum. Growing organically, we have reached more 650.000 subscribers in 4 years. Migrating to another platform would pose the problem of building such an audience again. What would they do elsewhere while waiting for answer? Would a large chunk of the readership come to a new platform in the first place or would it turn into contributors just basically writing blog posts with no questions asked by the audience because the audience is at most a 100 people rather than thousands that are around this site?

Since our mission is outreach, we go where the people are but we also depend on readership to ask those questions that drive the format since that is what makes the format unique (and also creates some of its flaws but that just as an aside).

The second factor to consider is money and logistics: Reddit offers an infrastructure for what we do in the sense that we do contribute to them being able to run their servers (and more) financially but we can also use these servers free of charge and relatively free of advertising. Any new platform would have to be set up by us, maintained by us, and paid for by us. Using the Amazon affiliate links has so far made us about 8$, which is far from enough for any such operation.

Additionally, new infrastructure, maintaining it, popularizing it and so forth would cost money. Money we'd somehow have to make and that involves people generating content for us – content we all feel we'd need to offer compensation for. With reddit, it is reddit making money of off all our contributions and we sort of go along with that because we like what we do and have build here. But thrust into the position of reddit, we as the people moderating this community feel like we'd have to do better and offer compensation to those putting so much hard work to write the content for this forum.

This, in turn, would also cost time and money to establish a legal structure in order to make this possible as well as a staff to administer it all. All of us have other jobs etc. but the initial investment of labor and capital in such a thing would just simply overwhelm us at this point.

There is, unfortunately, not academic-financial support, such as an endowment, for projects like this because this and similar formats have also not really entered the discourse of this field yet. Basically we'd either need another platform such as this – presenting similar problems – or a – so to speak – buttload of money to build our own. And that we – at the moment and in the foreseeable future – do not have.

Also, as a sidenote:

This

Moderators appear to spend most of their time filtering the noise generated by users, rather than contributing to content.

makes me and a lot of other mods a bit unhappy since many of us do contribute quite a lot of content in the form of answers and regular feature from Monday, methods, Tuesday Trivia, the podcast and so forth to the sub.

This question was asked some time ago here and it appears that, even with all the negatives Reddit presents, the overall consensus was “no, not really,” although there were a couple differences of opinion.

The issue of taking the final "Journey into the West", has been discussed a few times among the moderator team for a while.

As noted below and reposted here there has been posts about this before.

There are dozens of reasons and complications involved in making any sort of migration off of Reddit that involve everything from "being where the people are" to financials, copyright, staffing, web design, programming, traffic, etc. Any sort of migration off site would require us to essentially turn the sub into a web start up. Honestly, I'm not sure how strong of an IPO for shares of AskHistorians would be.

Seriously though, the real fundamental truth for why AskHistorians stays on Reddit, is because the moderator team are Redditors, the users are Redditors, and the Flaired contributors are Redditors.

Our presence here has in some ways benefited Reddit. By maintaining a civil discourse on several really emotionally charged topics that come up within the cultural zeitgeist (I used my word of the day calendar word! Yay!), we are able to help educate users on Reddit on topics that vary from the Holocaust, the Confederacy, genocide, Civil Rights, LGBTQ history, womens rights, and more. We have answered questions that were directly generated by debates around the site about human history and civilization and helped users learn about their world by going beyond basic Wikipedia citations and half remembered sophomore survey courses.

We have provided a great example of good moderation with an ever adapting set of rules to tackle the changes of the social media landscape. Our sub is one of the most often cited among a small few (AskScience, IAMA, etc.) by the founders and admins as what is best about this website and what socially generated content can provide. We have actually been invited to speak at conferences of professional historians on how we have shaped history education in the digital landscape. For us to be honored by our peers like that is a HUGE compliment since many academics can spend a full career in the field and never get invited to speak on a platform that large and have that great of an influence (humblebrag, humblebrag).

Finally, and I think this is probably the most overlooked benefit we have of being a part of the Reddit ecology, is one that I personally have benefited from. We provide a way for users to improve their thinking, debate, writing, and discourse skills. We show people on this site, who may not have the benefit of a college education or the training, the importance of critical thinking about information. History is more than just rote recitation of names, dates, and places like they teach in far to many primary educations, but a dynamic way of understanding the world that incorporates economics, science, psychology, anthropology, engineering, etc., and building it together into a holistic way of viewing the world. The level of writing that we strive for here may not be peer reviewed journal quality, but it is massively better than shitposts and for people who want to participate it gives the opportunity to practice their writing as well as reasoning skills. When it's a controversial issue that can generate debate, between the cultural expectations of a post in this sub as well as the rules, we have arguably improved many peoples ability to debate and reason without devolving into name calling and insults (even though I must admit name calling and insults can be cathartic).

We expect the debate and discussion about leaving the land of the pharaohs and searching for the promised land to continue for as long as this sub exists. For now though, the complicated, frustrating, and often problematic nature of AskHistorians sharing a place along some unsavory places and people is more beneficial for ourselves as well as the larger Reddit community.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go get my shitpost on in /r/youdontsurf.