I feel like my previous post isn’t entirely what I wanted to say or how I wanted to say it. So I’ll elaborate.
I participate in a private mailing list for journalists and academics, and I wish all the time that we’d migrate from Google Groups to plain old Discourse, because the latter is better in every way as a mailing list or private discussion forum than the former. So there is a place in my life for “group inbox that I share with peers,” and Discourse fills it better than anything else out there, to the point that I’m irritated that I have to use a group inbox that isn’t Discourse.
But there is also a place in my life for FB and Twitter, where I can do one-to-many publishing and curation. But those platforms are toxic garbage and I hate them, and I’d like to fill that place instead with something that’s free and open-source and lets users own their own data and has mature moderation and access control features and has a great post editor and… well, is basically Discourse but more maker- and personality-centric.