I think the problem here, as others mentioned, is conflating the term “infinite scroll” with “infinite content”.
As Richard mentioned here:
and as Jonathan mentioned with email too:
Discourse does not have infinite content, unlike social media — which keeps providing new randomized content nonstop (that you’ve never seen before) as you keep scrolling. That’s what makes it addictive.
Discourse and email do not constantly keep providing new random content if there is no more content at the bottom of the screen. You have a finite number of emails, just as there is a finite number of topics in a Discourse category or forum.
When browsing the homepage list of topics, you eventually reach the line on Discourse that marks the topics published since your last visit. And both Discourse and email visually indicate on the homepage the topics that you’ve read before, by un-bolding them, but they still keep them on your feed.
Whereas in social media feeds (on X/Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, BlueSky, etc), they don’t keep a static list of content ordered by date published - it’s an ever-changing feed of new content. Every time you open the homepage feed, it’s different, and they don’t show you things that you’ve seen before — they’re constantly pushing new unseen posts onto the feed. That’s not the case at all with Discourse. Discourse doesn’t remove topics that you’ve already seen from the homepage, and then keep shuffling random new topics onto your feed nonstop.
The term “infinite scroll” in Discourse does not refer to infinite content — it just refers to the mechanism by which the list is displayed, whether it is displayed by pages or a scroll feature. What’s more, I think your suggestion of the “Show More” button in the OP fundamentally is not that different to the existing feature — it just shows the next set of topics by a press of a finger rather than a swipe of a finger.
Trust me, it’s such a relief coming back to Discourse forums after having tried out those other sites at others’ behest — the addictive features on those sites are a completely different beast. If you’ve had to use them for a month at least (which I myself had never had to do before), you’ll start to understand how different they are to Discourse.
(If you haven’t used those sites for a month before, try it and then come back with your observations, as I’d be interested to hear your opinions. It was genuinely quite a shock to me seeing what other people in my generation have grown up with, as someone who has mainly limited herself to forums / blogs / articles / videos and the like when browsing for longform online content before)