I don’t disagree you at all. But yet Discourse is a compromise or trade-off quite often. I can get very much better blogging platform using WordPress, but it can’t give a functional forum.
I have few option to sell things, and Discourse is not in that list.
Hosting podcasts using Discourse? Forget it.
And all my options in those three examples are such ones that don’t leak or hog data.
We have to separate things:
- what an user needs
- what an admin/owner needs
And from my point of view we have two questionmarks:
- as an admin/owner I must use separate solutions because all do own niche very well, but sidejobs not that much
- users want separate apps to use those services, because (social) media corporations wanted that because of… data.
Did I say people is brainless cattle? Pretty much they are. Or if I want to format that more polite way: most of people don’t know and are after easier solution. Plus everything changed when Jobs (it could be Nokia, Blueberry etc. too) introduced first real smartphone, that operated on app-level.
I’m a bit negative today. I’m totally happy user of Discourse, as an end user and an admin. It is briljant forum software. But we just can’t beat separate app-world and multi-biljon corporates when every user, those who creates, those who consumes and those who collect all benefits want something else.