I recently spent a couple of days digging into the currently available alternative/self-host social media platforms, Mastodon (too much like Twitter IMO), Diaspora, Friendica, and a few others. Mastodon was the most mature, but again too Twitter-like. There is nothing that is as polished and functional as Discourse is in terms of the core experience, flexibility, etc, as far as I have seen. And so to me it actually makes perfect sense to want to use Discourse for social media-esque purposes, and I too find it odd and rather frustrating that there seems to be a persistent dislike for that kind of engagement or “model” here in Meta, and among the CDCK team to some degree.
Here’s the thing: forums were never an inherently “civil” form of discussion. They are arguably more biased towards long form, but that is not inherently civil. CDCK made great effort to make them “civil”, and promote good interactions, even if they’re “just” a Like/Heart. If the view of CDCK is that social media interactions have some negative aspects, why not try to fix that with clever design, features, functionality, etc. and make the space better like was done with forums? In the end these are just different styles of interaction and potential types of “civil discourse”.
I think it’s a mistake to simply write-off an entirely, extremely popular method of interaction just because it tends to have some downsides. There are also wonderful things that happen in social media, amazing things that, in my experience, happen less in Discourse because of some of its design decisions. If expanding the model to encompass social media-like options (e.g. mainly a “feed”-style view) would fundamentally disadvantage or hurt the baseline forum model that Discourse currently uses, then OK, that should be the focus and such expansion should be avoided. But I don’t think that’s actually the case.