What’s the story behind your community?

Gemeenschap
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Starting a community usually begins with something bigger than choosing a platform.

Maybe you want to bring together people with a very specific interest. Maybe your users need a better place to exchange knowledge. Maybe important conversations are scattered across social media, email, or group chats, and you’re ready to give them a more permanent home.

Whatever brought you here, we’d love to hear about it.

Use this topic to share the story behind your community, where things stand today, and what you hope to create next.

You might tell us:

  • What inspired you to start the community
  • Who the community is for
  • What you hope members will be able to do together
  • Where you are in the setup or launch process
  • One thing you are excited about
  • One thing you are still trying to figure out

You do not need to have everything planned. A few sentences are plenty.

Your community might be…

A place for people navigating a very specific experience

For example, perhaps you are creating a community for people caring for diabetic cats. Members may need practical advice, emotional support, trusted resources, and a place to learn from people who truly understand the day-to-day experience.

A home for an interest that deserves more than a fast-moving feed

Maybe you are bringing together vintage synthesizer enthusiasts, independent game designers, local gardeners, or people restoring historic homes. You want conversations to remain useful and searchable instead of disappearing after a few hours.

A space supporting a shared project or mission

Perhaps you are organizing volunteers, contributors to an open-source project, members of a neighborhood initiative, or people working toward a common cause. Your community may need a place to coordinate, document decisions, welcome newcomers, and keep momentum going.

Every community starts with its own mix of people, purpose, and possibility.

So, what is the story behind your community?

Reply below and tell us what you are building, who it is for, and what you hope it can become. We’re excited to hear about it!

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My story is very common and not sexy at all: all issues that Facebook groups have, lack of moderation mostly (but sure, Meta’s business model played big role too). Or shortly: wish to be independent and offer independent community.

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3

I’ll go! I’ll go!

I think of Meta as a space supporting a shared project and mission. The project part is pretty obvious, but the mission part is becoming more and more important—to me at least. Here we are surrounded by people that share our open source values and are working together to build a product which solves real problems for real humans.

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The communities I run are all migrations of old forums. The goal is to keep unique information available and organized, as well as keeping those communities active by offering an alternative to social media or private messaging apps where many members went over the years, partly because the older software wasn’t modern enough (not responsive, bloated, generally media-hostile…).

Of the three communities I was a member of and that I migrated, one failed but I couldn’t do anything about it. The original domain and all content was lost. Trying to rebuilding this from scratch when the original community was already small because of social media (this niche was stroke hard by it) was too difficult. The new forum never reached the critical mass. I keep it online and public, but no one posts on it except me. I use it to keep and publish information I find interesting. :slight_smile:

But overall what matters most to me is that the information is community-contributed, lasting, organized, reliable, publicly available, and free.

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Firstly, Hello to all, and @Danielle @HAWK @Canapin @Jagster sorry this may be too long for some.

The Story Behind Our Community

Our community, Property Success with NEW KIDS, was created to support people and businesses across New Zealand and Australia who are living in a home or are somewhere on a real estate journey.

The Journey

We built the community around a simple belief: once we leave home, we are always on some sort of a real estate journey.

That journey might begin with a student renting their first room, a young family buying their first home, a business owner leasing new premises, or a young farmer purchasing their first farm. Throughout our lives, our housing and property needs continue to evolve.

What We Believe

After 38 years in the real estate industry, I’ve come to believe one thing above all else:

No matter where you live, work, or invest in real estate, it’s who you know and what you know that makes the biggest difference.

Our goal is to make that knowledge, experience, and network accessible to everyone.

Who Needs Us?

Every day, someone is becoming the “new kid on the block.”

Whether they’re renting, buying, selling, renovating, investing, relocating, or starting a business, there’s always someone looking for trusted advice and a supportive community.

Our Community Is the Front Door

We think of our Discourse community as the front door to our home.

Members arrive through that front door and can then explore the different “rooms” that match their interests—Home Life, Retirement+, Commercial Property, Farming, Investment, and many more. Each room is designed to help people connect, learn, and succeed on their own real estate journey.

We’re still in the early stages, but we’re excited about what we’re building and grateful to the Discourse team for providing such a powerful platform that makes communities like ours possible.

Property Success with NEW KIDS

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6

I love this idea.

(It’s also great to see a fellow kiwi here.)

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Hi, I’m sono_hen from Japan. :waving_hand:
I recently started a small Discourse community called “Doushitara Ii Project,” which roughly translates to “What should I do?”
The idea behind it is very simple:
I want it to be a place where people can bring a problem even before they know how to turn it into a clear question.
Sometimes we know that something is bothering us, but we still don’t know:
“What should I ask?”
“Who should I ask?”
“What options do I even have?”
I don’t want this community to become a place where one person gives the “correct answer” to everything.
Instead, I hope it can become a place where different people’s knowledge and experience — and sometimes AI — can connect, so that someone can begin to see:
“What could I do next?”
One idea that is important to me is:
“If one way doesn’t work, maybe there is another way.”
I also want to preserve not only the final answers, but the process of thinking through a problem:
What did we check?
Where did we look?
How did we think about it?
I hope that, when someone with a similar problem finds the discussion later through search, it may help them think,
“Maybe there is another way to look at this.”
In that sense, I sometimes think of the forum as a kind of:
“living book.”
The community is still very new.
For now, my goal is not to grow a large membership.
My first milestone is simply to receive 10 genuine problems or questions from people who don’t already know me.
I’m still learning about Discourse and community building, and I’m very happy to be here and learn from everyone. :blush:

6 likes