I absolutely agree. What Discourse promises to become is tantalising, yet it doesn’t come across as being committed to this radicalism.
Discourse is sometimes referred to as a “legacy platform” (e.g. this article from last year) in comparisons against modern platforms like Discord and Circle; and I can’t imagine searching “[keyword] Discourse” the way it’s normal to search “[keyword] Reddit”, even if this brought up Discourse forums in the results in the first place. One of the main reasons for this is that (for whatever reason) forums tend to become insular, and full of people who have never tried the new thing (and instead opt to argue on the forum about why they already know all about the new thing). That’s a far worse kind of noise than the noise typical of chats.
Fast-moving, topic-agnostic communication is a powerful counter against this trend towards decay in online communities. People can go do other stuff outside of the platform, come back with thoughts and links, and people who don’t keep up don’t get to participate because the discourse moves on.
@codinghorror gives a good explanation of why chats are good for forums here, even within the context of a single forum:
But it’s worrying that he even had to explain chats are not antithetical to “quality content, or with content at all”. It sounds like Facebook-exclusive users describing TikTok without having used it themselves to get how it works. As a discussion about how to design a “discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet”, that’s a non-starter. And it’s getting pretty close to a decade since the initial release.
The new generation of community software that embraces that ambiguity of platform design are “simple, modern, and fun”. What was “simple, modern, fun” a decade ago isn’t simple, modern, fun today. For example, see how similar the UI designs are between modern community platforms and modern chats. Chats promote speed and novelty, and the attendant UI designs support this feature. Speed and terseness is a good thing most of the time, especially when there’s a way to readily pursue depth as appropriate (i.e. chat-to-forum features). It’s fundamentally misguided to think that speed and novelty are opposed to serious and meaningful conversations.
I think we have to be careful here when thinking about what it means for the solution to have “already existed”. That being said, I’m inclined to say something similar about federation, and think that Discourse could benefit massively from federated chats and forums. Maybe only the chats could be federated, but help to bridge Discourse instances indirectly.