Thank you for this note, Kevin. I’m currently considering a host platform for my online community - whilst I see Facebook Groups racking up hundreds of thousands of members in my space, I’m persuaded to invest my efforts in community building on a proprietary platform vs. social media.
Social media reach and search reach via Google is good for discovery, but when it comes to getting serious about long term sustainability - an independent (self-hosted) platform like Discourse is surely a wiser choice, by comparison.