They tend toward being “community-in-a-box” platforms, which have specific use cases and feature sets for their audiences. Discourse tends to be more of a Swiss army knife where it can do anything you want it to with a little work.
I have another article I’m working on defining the difference between audience and community. It’s common to interchange the two, but they are vastly different concepts and deserve to be treated differently.
Here’s a great article to get started.
Right! It’s about connecting with people through conversations that matter to you. The closest thing to a “feed” in Discourse is the tracked topics feature. But this is all built around how you choose to engage, not some mysterious algorithm that picks it for you.