Good question, Mae. A few things I’d love to see:
- Growth for niche and self-hosted communities: acquisition when we can’t rely on big social platforms, or our audience deliberately avoids them.
- Using Discourse AI for retention, not just moderation: daily summaries, translations into minority languages, semantic search over community knowledge. Custom integrations.
- Real case studies from small communities: what worked, what didn’t, with live cases and numbers.
- How your own teams work: how they’re organized and where they connect day to day (marketing, product, community, engineering). Honestly, I’m curious about this one, and I completely understand if that’s internal by design.
I’ve been running and customizing a community on Discourse for a while, and I’m happy to share our experience if it’s ever useful.