I’m gonna talk in hypotheticals, so don’t let me derail you from getting into the spirit of self-hosting. It’s a good place to be; stick with it!
In another galaxy far, far away, I can see the following possibly materialising.
Categories as Google Discourse Groups
The thing about the vast majority of open source projects is that they’re really small. They’re just one or two people who made a handy library that they’ll commit some code to once in an odd while. The really trivial ones get by just fine with nothing but a GitHub issue tracker and a public e-mail.
The slightly more active ones will benefit from the type of back-and-forth public discussion that GitHub issues or 1-to-1 e-mail doesn’t lend itself well to. While a dedicated Discourse instance seems like an excellent solution to this problem, it can easily be too much too soon. A small upstart can look & feel like a ghost town if topics aren’t even coming in on a daily basis, and those avatar thumbnails are dominated by the same faces.
An inconspicuous Google Group on the other hand is much more low-key and lends itself better to a slow buildup. The catch? The Google Groups export story is absolutely terrible, so when you’re finally ready to transition from “group of early adopters” to “full blown community”, the migration burden holds you back.
I think it’d be wonderful if Discourse (for now I’m just talking about the software – whether this is something the company should take on is a different matter) could be used more like a Google Group.
Imagine a “http://discoursegroups.org” forum.
- Sign up (for free) by entering some project meta data
- Get a category of your own
- Start discussing
The problems that remain to be solved are:
- There’s no built-in way to automatically provision a category for a new user upon request.
- We’d need support for category-specific digests. No one would want a sitewide digest in this case.
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We need support for category-specific moderators(coming in v1.7) -
Parity with mailing-list features could be a lot better(The MOSS sprint has brought us pretty much on par with popular mailing lists).
On the other hand, we’ve already got a ton of features that far exceed what you’d get out of a Google Group. Putting aside the whole “with Discourse you can actually build a community” aspect for a moment, there are a couple more things that excite me:
Give your Discourse Group a personal touch
I love what they’re doing over at forum.gearboxsoftware.com, wherein if you drill down into a game-category, the look is tailored to that game.
We’re not as styling-agnostic as Reddit, but it’s good start, and more than Google Groups can do.
Category export
Category export is specced out and on the roadmap, and it’s a big deal. This means that, unlike Google Groups, if you created a Discourse Group you’d still own your data. Best of all, since Discourse is open source it’s easy to pack up your stuff and move into your very own home once you’ve outgrown your shared space.
Integrations
We can offer a level of integration with popular open source tools like GitHub and Slack which Google Groups will never come close to. (also see ost.io)