My fav Discourse sites were forum.gethopscotch.com and disco.auxy.co
On the Hopscotch forum, it was just such a lovely community that really pushed the boundaries of Hopscotch (iOS drag-and-drop coding app for kids). Both the spirit of Hopscotch and Discourse were so vibrantly alive in the forum, and this was highly influential on me — so much so that you can really trace it to this day in me as a person. I was very active there and loved to share tips and tricks from my coding projects – often writing really in-depth explanations. Hopscotch and the forum were very close to my heart (I ended up working at Hopscotch later on and I was also admin/moderator on the forum.)
With Auxy Disco, it was another Discourse community for a super cool and intuitive iOS app – Auxy, the music-making app. I was much less visible on there – more of a lurker, due to my music abilities not being as developed as my coding abilities – but I picked up so many tips from other people, because people would share their projects like the Hopscotch community did and people would talk about the music-making process.
Unfortunately Auxy Disco was shut down, and the Hopscotch forum is now read-only with the community transitioning to Discord instead (and most of the forum is not currently publicly visible anymore)
And you can say that’s this is very Discourse-y of me, but I have NEVER EVER recovered from this. I’m a Person of Many Paragraphs, and I could be that way — and was encouraged to be that way — because of Discourse. And nowadays online, everywhere I am, people elsewhere find it too hard to read everything that I write because I write paragraph after paragraph and other platforms are just not built for that kind of thing. It’s very sad.
Another friendly community that I enjoy browsing occasionally now is IntFiction:
They are a community of interactive fiction writers. They’re also very verbose people like me, so I like that, but again, game design & creative writing are less developed skills for me compared my other primary domains, so I’m not as active on there.
Yeah I wish there were many more Discourse sites in the wild (and have tried to start some more of my own) but unfortunately a lot of people seem to be trying to really push for proprietary platforms like Discord and Reddit these days…