I do think Discourse needs to reconsider their key selling points. From my perspective, two of those selling points are:
#1 “We treat you like a human being”. Discourse is real humans helping real humans, and for anyone sufficiently traumatized by the FB AI, that’s getting to a basic and core human need.
#2 “We protect your information”. That one requires some explanation, but once people understand that when FB AI glitches and suspends your account, that every post, every resource, and every comment you ever made just disappears, selling them on the idea of information permanence has real value.
Discourse spends too much time selling the idea of “community” when it lacks any of Facebook’s network effects. I understand the way they mean it, but it can be true and also be a bad selling proposition. I also believe the lack of threaded discussions hurts them, at least when users are coming over from systems like FB and Reddit. It’s pointless to have a religious war over which system is better and why. The fact is that the FB crowd is trained to like threaded discussions, and they will just feel immediately at home if that method is preserved. They could make the choice of threaded discussions a setup option for a forum.