personal anecdote; I found Discourse because I was Google searching for “best web forum software” and browsing the handful of “top 10 software” list articles. The old PHP based softwares were on all the lists, along with one called Flarum which I very nearly tried out, but also Discourse was on most of the lists. It was then that I realized that “Discourse” was the thing that all the support forums I had used in the past ~5 years was running on and that I recognized it even though I never noticed I had been using it across many different websites.
However, what ultimately influenced by decision to try using it, was the deployment method. Flarum looked good but the deployment sounded complicated. Discourse uses a Docker based deployment, which is a god-send. I work on servers all day long, I dont want my hobby forum to be another round of “work”. Not sure if its been emphasized how big a deal this is. If Discourse was not Docker based, I would have passed it up. Similarly, the detailed deployment and management documentation, along with this forum itself, gave me enough assurance to invest my personal time and money in putting together a deployment for it.
I guess this does not help the company behind Discourse very much though, because I am not paying them for the service, I am self-hosting it. But it is a pretty significant point that the vast majority of software communities I take part in have already moved to Discourse. Seems like pretty much everyone is suffering greatly at the hands of Slack and Discord for “high signal low noise” discussions, partly because valuable information just gets lost in the sea of messages, as someone in here already noted. In the workplace, I also see a lot of competition from Microsoft Teams, believe it or not. They have a “forum” style interface built in, which is downright awful, but its also connected to your company’s IT interfaces and other MS products, along with the video calling features. I keep floating the idea of a Discourse forum for internal use, but the lack of the extra integrations leaves it unfeasible. Nobody at work wants yet another account they need to manage on yet another company website. Perhaps if there was some way to have Discourse embedded more closely into the company’s internal infra, it could make headway there.
On the flip side, however, I do feel like Discourse’s “out of the box experience” leaves a lot to be desired if you want a “low signal high noise” community. Discourse does not have as many of the “fun” features that make other platforms like Discord enjoyable to use. Maybe there is not really a market for this anymore, but there are still people out there who greatly appreciate using a forum for fun, meaningless, enjoyable conversations. One such community I am familiar with had about 200 million posts from a couple thousand users before it shut down. Those users will all be looking for new homes; Discord is actually not too popular with that demographic due to its “chat room” format, but I am not sure if they will find Discourse to be “fun” enough to keep their attention.
Not sure if its been mentioned, but I feel like one of the reasons Discourse might not be recommended as much is because it feels too “clean” and too much like a “business tool”. I think the comparison to something like Facebook Groups is interesting, considering that companies like Facebook invest absurd sums of money into boosting platform engagement and getting people addicted to their platform. Perhaps the lack of such measures would contribute to fewer people raving about how much fun they had e.g. scrolling threads on Discourse for three hours last night.