What about medium tech?

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I was at a conference this morning that was discussing big tech’s role in fueling online polarization. My assumption is that it has played a role - I’m old enough to be able to compare the pre-internet world to what we’ve got now.

A proposed solution was that instead of having people vie for attention on large social media platforms, discussions should occur among smaller groups, on platforms that don’t use algorithms to curate user’s feeds.

What’s interesting is that Discourse meets the criteria of the proposed solution and that an educated group of people didn’t seem to be aware of platforms like Discourse or the open source ecosystem. That got me wondering if we’re being a bit too quiet about it. How can non-technical people be made aware that there are viable alternatives to Facebook and Twitter?

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Indeed. Getting the info out there is both easy & difficult. To get exposure you need pretty much to use the whale platforms like FB, X(twitter), Reddit etc.

With doing so though. It becomes a competition for visibility. Smaller communities do indeed hold a lot of value However like stores; people are more likely to visit a store in a mall vs going to a solo location. Due to convenance and familiarity.

Things like Discourse Discover can help. However ppl are more creatures of habit that will often stick to what they have become comfortable using. Ie FB alternative like MeWe that is more user friendly and doesn’t share harvest your data and is ad free.

Now if we could get some booming FB groups and Reddit subs & X account promoting a directory of dedicated community spaces using things like Discourse may work

Save the other user benefit using a mega platform. Number of seperate user accounts needed for multiple communities vs joining an all in one.

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How viable are these alternatives seen by the target future admins and their potential users?

Discourse.org offers an instance for $50/month. For many it’s a tall call to start an experiment when you don’t even know whether you will be able to pull any users out of their FB / X / Insta / etc cages, which are free of charge. WordPress.com starts at $4. Masto.host starts at $6. That’s more like it.

The out of the box experience for admins is overwhelming for the average non-tech entrepreneur. Too many features they won’t need any time soon. Same for users even at trust level 0. Most non-tech users feel intimidated by Discourse during their first days, even if they are fluent social media & instant messaging users, publishing their pics, audios, and what not. Non-tech people in their 20s and 30s with a PhD and a social or political drive also get intimidated or confused at first.

Imagine a Discourse.org dumbed down version to match i.e. Facebook Groups’ admin and user experience except for some existing features like social logins and UI customization. Free for three months and then $5/month until you hit some ceiling of success (active users, more complex features, own domain…) that makes you want to upgrade.

And imagine your plan continues to be free / heavily discounted if you join Discourse Network, enabling Discourse.org social login to allow other Discourse users to seamlessly join your site, and featuring banners / promotion from other Discourse sites that the alghoritm defines as close to your community. Your Discourse will be promoted in other instances as well!

Easy start, easy expansion, easy to get promoted to likeminded users… This is the promise done by the corporate social media, totally appealing to human psyche.

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It’s maybe worth noting that my own interest is in promoting the idea of being an active participant on the internet - that you can rent a VPS for $10/month and do stuff with it. One thing you can do is setup a Discourse forum, but specifically promoting Discourse is kind of out of my hands.

That said, if I was trying to market Discourse to a wider audience, I wouldn’t compromise on price. Instead, I’d make it clear how Discourse makes money - that it’s open source software that you can install yourself. Make it as easy as possible for people to install it. If they don’t want to deal with that, they can have a hosted site for $x/month. They can move between the hosted and self-hosted options any time they wish.

Here’s a good defense of the idea of not trying to compete with big tech on price: Quality software deserves your hard‑earned cash — Steph Ango.

I’d also make it clear that Discourse doesn’t own or sell your data. Contrast this with what you get from Facebook/Reddit.*

It is. I wrote about the idea that Discourse should develop templates that are designed to solve specific problems here: Why isn't Discourse more frequently recommended as a "community platform"? - #127 by simon. This could be done on a per-problem basis:

  • Identify the problem your trying to solve. For example discussions, with a possible emphasis on contentious discussions.
  • Identify the target audience. For example, academics, NGOs, government organizations, neighborhood organizations, large Twitter accounts and Facebook groups, etc.
  • Create a demo site and a Ruby script (template) that can be used to spin up pre-configured sites.
  • Market the heck out of it.

I could be wrong about this, but it also seems low risk. It’s not asking for features to be added to Discourse. I know marketing campaigns can get expensive though.

*[If it was ~6 months from now, I’d link to “Simon’s Discourse Archiver” app to demonstrate that your data could be converted to a static HTML site if you ever wanted to stop using Discourse.]

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I had a similar idea for a thought experiment a little while back where I wondered how many of the features you could comfortably disable/hide and still be left with a ‘minimum viable Discourse’ site.

Super-simplify, both for admins and new users, with one eye on reducing friction for new starts but also on limiting support needs so the hosted price could be kept relatively low.

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That is the fundamentally difference here. All 5 USD services are for those who can’t make money with that service. Customers who can pay prices of CDCK are enterprises that are already making money.

Two different things. WordPress can make some buck out of B2C sectors with low fee because buyers are buying for themselves. I don’t see how CDCK (of course I’m including theirs competitors too) could make any money out of that. Or getting new real customers, if that B2C sector would counted as part of marketing.

I don’t care idealism here, and open source where everybody pay theirs fees other than using software gives two things:

  • some free deveploment
  • bunch of free beta testers

Don’t get me wrong. For me that position suits very well — but CDCK et al doesn’t actually need us self hosters, and they defenetly don’t need 5 USD customers for obvious reason: they would be then clients with another rules than B2B :wink:

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Well simply telling folks about discourse/other ways of communication is a way to start, I have been doing that but about fb/twitter/x can just be a lot of distracting nonsense don’t really see discourse as an “alternative” to those.

Could be people are so heavily invested in other platforms they will never leave, and with that they may not see much reason or interest to consider launching a discourse site or joining someone else’s.

If more people can start to let go of fb/x then there may be more emigration to discourse sites.

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Just keeping my instance and use & sharing others instances it enough to me I won’t looking troubles with FB, X or whatever.

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That could help if they wanted to launch something like that one day, there was a discount last year for the basic plan at half cost of only $25 a month isn’t too bad.

Price is quite a bit lower if split by founding members, five members each paying $5 a month totals $25.

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I don’t think the problem is anything that Discourse is or isn’t doing. These large centralized sites have a massive advantage in so many ways. The amount of times I’ve ended up on the app store page for TikTok despite never wanting to install it is insane.

Most people don’t look past 5 websites on the internet. Whether Discourse costs $50 a month or pays people $50 a month, it won’t shift the central issue. Decentralized forum-style platforms will always be a niche until there is a change in consumer mindset

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They do, but there might be ways of taking advantage of them. I don’t think the problem is that people only visit large social media sites, it’s that the sites function as the hub of people’s activity on the internet. Academic Twitter is (or at least used to be) a good example of this. These people are reading articles all day, then posting about them on Twitter. Another pattern is someone scrolling Twitter, clicking on a link to read an article then respond to it on Twitter. It’s a bit of a feedback loop. I think the place to disrupt it is at the website level. For example, someone scrolls through Twitter, clicks on a link, then sees there’s an interesting discussion they can join on the website’s Discourse forum.

It may be overly optimistic, but I think the user behavior aspect of this is a solvable problem. What I’m wondering is if the people who make decisions for non-tech organizations are aware of Discourse.

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They may or may not, but that isn’t the questionmark. The issue here is forums feed only Google and registrate users. And they get that already via WWW.

They aren`t looking for discussion. Xwitter, and all social media in general, is made for monology, and sharing.

With common people the difficult of forums is they should find a different forum for every niche. One for pets, one for hiking, one for gardening. And there isn’t nowadays. I have the biggest dog/dog feeding related group of Finnish Facebook, around 30 000 members. And even I have the biggest Finnish website of same niche I can make only 1000 human visits a month, and only via Google and sharing links in that group[1]. And I have related forum, spiced with more universal topics — there is only something like three hundred registerated users and only handful of those are active. Sure, Discourse tells I have 500 - 1000 anon views every day, but big part of those views are one time visits via Google.

I’ve asked what is the biggest problem not to use forum. The answer is always same:

  • it looks strange and is difficult to use
  • everybody is on Facebook

From my point of view this topic is another ”how we can beat sosial media” and… we can’t. But sure, there are different examples too that gives a bit hope. Like the biggest (and only AFAIK) finnish ice hockey related community of a team is using Discourse. iNaturalist and its finnish branch uses Discourse too.

CDCK is reaching that goal. But they are targeting support forum style and that way they are living in totally different world than we other.

  1. Facebook is now actively banning such link sharing posts, because those only tries to get clicks :man_facepalming: ↩︎

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I fully agree with you, and this is exactly my approach. However, this topic is about non-technical people and how can they try something different outside of the big corporate platforms. Convincing many of them of trying to build their own space is already a long shot, but imho doable with affordable managed hosting that removes most of the technical complexity. Although creating and destructing virtual servers is damn easy and cheap nowadays, the non-technical people won’t go there yet.

This is why I think that whatever the solutions, they need to be offered as web services designed for non-technical people.

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Improving technical barriers, for non-technical people

I think it’s a good way of framing it. I would say that there are two main technical barriers to Discourse:

  • administration
  • installation/hosting

There are various other topics & posts discussing the administration barriers. So i’ll focus on the hosting.

Mitigating hosting technical barriers

For non-technical people, self-hosting isn’t a likely option, so they’d opt to have someone else to host it for them. (For centralised services, they all offer the hosting.)

Improving built-in crowdfunding on Discourse

Putting aside ideas for changes to business models for now, for people with smaller communities to be willing to try paying a higher price on Discourse’s hosting, I think having a more robust built-in crowdfunding could help to offset the costs in the long-term.

Improving out-of-the-box crowdfunding (like built-in members on Ghost—which is also successful medium tech open-source software which sells hosting as a service—or boosting servers on Discord which is centralised software) for Discourse forums could encourage more non-technical people to see it as an option in the long-term.

Right now funding methods can be done with plugins (official plugins too, if i recall correctly) but it’s not in core. For improving the crowdfunding, i mean having an easier built-in system where

  • admins can set up payment methods by default within Discourse (like I can do this in Ghost)
  • users can pay and be automatically added to groups with avatar flair, custom titles etc. or get access to categories for Q&A and so on

Highlight content creators & communities on Discourse

Maybe if Discourse can do collaborations with content creators who move to the platform (e.g. I think there would be some on free.discourse.group), who could talk about how great the platform is compared to other sites they’ve used, it would also encourage more non-technical people to try it for their own communities.

Highlight best of Discourse against pain points of big tech

For larger non-technical communities, I definitely wish people would use Discourse instead of jumping to Discord and leaving the rest to Reddit, which is pretty much what happens. Here again the question of non-technical people is important because e.g. a lot of the sites on Discourse Discover are technical at the moment.

I think the key is to really compete aggressively against the pain points of Discord and Reddit and Twitter & FB, and highlight the very best of Discourse.

E,g.

  • reddit isn’t good for extended discussion (pain point)
  • the fact that you can’t really follow most of what’s going on discord once you reach a few thousand people in a server unless you have a bunch of moderators active at certain times of day (pain point)
  • the fact that you can have conversations on Discourse that you can join regardless of timing. You can join in discussions that happened earlier in the week or years ago, and do it very fluidly.
    • With discord, if a conversation happened 2 months ago and there are thousands of replies since, you would be seen as very, very awkward if you tried to a reply to a message from 2 months ago.

Again as an example, Ghost also does this (try to compete aggressively):

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Administrative technical barriers

On this topic of administrative experience, i think what you mentioned here would be good

and having the templates etc. because the examples on Discourse Discover really lean towards tech communities.

Maybe diving into ‘complaint-driven development’ again (ala codinghorror) for this might also improve the experience for non-technical people looking to set up communities.

And there are other topics on this here e.g.

The key is:

If the technical barriers are improved, I think it would make it more likely that non-technical people who are running communities will recommend Discourse to others who are looking to run communities.

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Two points:

  1. Creating an environment never creates content/discussion. There must be demand first.
  2. Discourse has not any bigger barrier techwise why new admins couldn’t start use it. Are you forgetting WordPress now? The issue is when starting WordPress owner has content or at least plans how to get it. With Discourse is just some hope if everybody else start create content. And motivation to pay is way lower then.

I dislike crowdfunding a lot because it is de facto subscription model and quite few can make it profitable. But before an admin can use built-in paywall, or via plugin, same thing, that admin must has that much knowledge one can use Discourse AND payment system AND has users who are already created such content that someone will fund that.

And in that model nothing in this topic applies any more. At that point the target is search way to move more money from users’ pocket to hosting companies’ revenue :smirk: That is different thing than how difficult or easy Discourse is for admins. But it is quite close to topic how easy of difficult Discourse is for first-time-users — that dictates if they are willing to pay one subscription more.

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While I am always in favour of Discourse being as simple to install as possible, the primary problem is not on the supply side, but the demand side.

I could spin up 200 Discourse instances overnight on range of different interest, but no one would ever use them because of limited discoverability and minimal general demand.

Building a viable community feels like fighting against entropy. If you don’t pour a humongous amount of personal resources into keeping the place maintained and engaging, people will just go to Reddit/Facebook/Instagram/YouTube/TikTok that are highly engaging by default. When I go to public events in my hobby, the default question people ask is “what’s your insta?” because that’s the default window the hobby is viewed through unfortunately.

I like Discourse/forums because the level of engagement is so much deeper. I’ve seen the equivalent of a “Topic” in an instagram story and it’s a joke in comparison. But the barrier to entry to move from instagram to that deeper level is something few cross, either out of ignorance or satisfaction a surface level interest that is satisfied by a social media site alone. In a way it’s a perfect filter to keep out low-value members, but simultaneously it keeps the community generally insular.

So while it’s not something easy to do, the #1 place to shift the current paradigm as I see it is to reduce the instagram/Facebook/reddit → Discourse barrier. How? No idea. Maybe improved SEO or better hooking new users that stumble upon a Topic from a google search.

A healthy balance is like 1 sysadmin user to 100-10,000 users. Making it easier for the one sysadmin users is far less a priority compared to making it more likely that 1000 people to register and use the platform.

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Facebook is strange, I used to have that for ten years got to about 700 “friends” on there, then when I decided to let that go posted that I was leaving and literally only one person responded to that by asking “what happened?,” lol.

Have been using discourse as a landing page which apparently is terrible for that, can be confusing for people one person said “I don’t even know how to contact you with that,” even though this works as an e-mail receiver people don’t need to create an account.

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Every community, online or offline, needs a center of gravity. Something that pulls in the audience, ie. somerhing that provides value for them.

It source of gravity can be many things:

  • A common interest to develop/learn/supoort software (Discourse Meta)
  • A sports club (Tappara.co)
  • A person of high interest
  • Extremely high quality content by an expert

So on and so forth. Mega platforms have all of these. The audience does not really give a rat’s ass on the technical solution – they come for the substance.

Interestingly, businesses don’t get the benefits of the privately owned community either. I have tried selling Discourse as a service for some and the response is :man_shrugging:.

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I agree, especially when starting off. But there is a tipping point where the gravity needs to become self-sustaining. That is, where the value is not based on a single person but rather the platform itself is the value proposition and choosing to not be a part of it has a social cost to whatever niche you are a part of. That’s basically how all these massively large platforms do it.

It’s completely unrelated but your reply made me think of it. Anecdotally, I lost a number of “significant” community members from my forum because the audience is limited and many found it more self-serving to become microinfluencers/content creators and build their own small communities. Basically, it was better time value for them to spend their time making Instagram posts or Youtube videos and Discord servers than posting on a public forum because it directly benefited them in terms of followers or actual financial value. I can’t blame them either. But it’s another problem that there is a competing gravity pulling valuable, highly networked individuals away from Discourse. And if these members had stayed active, it would have really helped in creating the self-sustaining gravity I mentioned in the first paragraph.

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