Yep, for each individual community that doesn’t want to use the Hub you presently need to turn to the whitelisted app for iOS notifications.
That gets you quite far though.
That again is not Discourse/CDCK’s issue. The option exists in the ecosystem.
Discord does not have to worry about customised instances nor rebranding, Discourse gives you that freedom but it makes it less easy to deploy a community specific app.
Swings and roundabouts.
Give Tim a call and harass him … 
That is not an option for 99.9% of the community owners in terms of time, effort and money.
On Discord, every 15 year old school kid can get a community up and running in 3 minutes including mobile app notifications for all their friends, without any cost or without their friends needing to download an extra app.
And yes, I do know and understand all the technical backgrounds here, and I know this is hard to solve. But it’s still a turnoff for many people. They just want it to work, and that is easier with Discord.
The issue is Apple’s imho, its very simple.
All those users don’t care who they need to call, whether that is Tim, Jeff or Jason. They don’t care who’s fault this is. They want a working solution.
I am not blaming anyone for this (and I am fully aware that if anyone should be blamed it is Tim ), I am just explaining why people like Discord better than Discourse in terms of mobile experience.
Well sure, but not caring won’t fix this. It’s actually a matter of market abuse imho. I’m sure the EU may get there first, but Congress seems to be much more awake these days. People need to complain to their representative.
It’s definitely a valid benefit of the Discord app, 100% agree.
I need time to think before I respond with more than just expressing deep appreciation for this topic and I will, but this is a start.
Discourse, mobile-first? I thought it was not. Maybe it’s the case nowadays, but was it before?
Some features or page layouts aren’t really the best on mobile.
For example, the category page needs (in my opinion…) improvement as well as the image viewer; you can’t even swipe right/left to navigate through multiple images.
Hmmm… ok, I’ll pay more conscious attention and try to spell out what exactly make me feel so different about both cases.
Also, I had missed that there is an unofficial mobile app.
Born mobile, born to touch
Discourse was designed for high resolution touch devices, with a built-in mobile layout. Read or post from your laptop, tablet, and phone in your browser of choice, or our Discourse iOS app and Discourse Android app.
From Discourse features | Discourse - Civilized Discussion
As an admin in different web tools, I’m impressed by the fact that the full feature set is available at (let’s keep the marketing going 
) my fingertips when I wake up in the morning and lie lazily in my bed, reviewing that suspect spam or tagging that new topic. Or updating my pet project site after parking the car and before arriving to my desk. All these are real situations.
I have checked the Discourse Hub app again. It’s still what the title says, a hub for people using more than a Discourse instance. Once the user clicks an instance, they are 100% in their browser.
Discord’s App covers all the mobile user experience, there are no exits to the browser.
I don’t think they can be compared?
Where can one find this whitelisted app? Happy to try it out.
It is also webview based but the difference is you have a uniquely branded app which is marketed in the AppStore. Needs someone who knows what they are doing though as the set up, configuration and maintenance is quite involved.
I’m a big fan of both the Hub and the whitelisted app though.
Personally, I don’t find the idea of this post makes sense.
How does Discourse plan on remaining a viable alternative when popular chat platforms like Discord are building long-form methods of discussion into their core product? Just curious…
My reading of this is… Discord is attempting to remain a popular platform by taking useful ideas from the transparent development cycle of one of the best open source projects available. Discord is literally feeling some pressure to evolve, but this doesn’t make them superior outside of their popularity.
The reality is that major proprietary platforms are stagnant by design. Their goal is to remain big. Too big to fail. Eventually, these platforms die off.
What does Discourse offer?
Easy answer: Open development and equal access for closed and anonymously open communities. Discourse is a mature forum offering, which heavily integrates with Discord: Bots, notifications, chat x-posting. the whole nine yards. And it does tons more! And anyone can get involved. And, if you want you can ditch Discord integration entirely to migrate over to whatever platform integration will invariably replace it in the coming future.
Discord will continue to be what it is, a much more polished take on Mumble. It has sprawling community. Those who want to see what exciting features are being openly developed for forum and chat applications will want to stick with Discourse. All you need is to browse meta, and then set up Discourse as you see fit (with or without Discord).
Isn’t Discourse also responding to pressure to evolve, with the addition of chat? Isn’t this the nature of any business, that it must change to remain relevant and competitive? And isn’t this oddly in conflict with you saying Discord is “stagnant by design” below? 
What does “stagnant by design” mean? Discord has changed a lot since it began as a gaming-focused chat app, and it continues to evolve significantly. And while they have a different business model than Discourse, they are both still businesses, they both still want to make profits and, well, get bigger. They’ve both taken outside funding to do so, as well, it’s just that Discord has raised an order of magnitude mode money.
And didn’t Discourse itself replace old, “too big to fail” forum platforms that “died off”? It did so by being better than they are. By understanding what the old platforms weren’t doing as well as they could and fixing that.
The separation of forum and chat as modes of communication is becoming increasingly awkward, and so Discord and Discourse both are trying to solve it. This is good. But I definitely hope CDCK is taking Discord’s efforts to dip a toe into their forum territory very seriously. That’s how they remain competitive and continue to provide a great platform for us all to enjoy for years to come. Not by dismissing their competitors as “stagnant by design” and expecting them to just die off if they (Discourse) merely “stay the course” and persevere long enough.
I’ve seen it as “keyword forum”, google that and you’ll find the same.
Ask any large chat moderator what their problems are and you will get many, many answers. Chat is great for some things, and it is my bad that I did not embrace the fast lane / slow lane paradigm sooner, but it’s also terrible for memory, organization, and retention — hence the number one complaint of any chat mod of the same questions getting asked over and over and people expecting a personal valet to spoon feed them the answers as they type questions … help vampirism.
And people did indeed say Slack was the future of communication. They were wrong about that, but they were right that chat is becoming way more dominant as a default paradigm for “community” than I thought it would be… we are working on it though and this is a good example of that nice smooth fast lane / slow lane integration cc @JammyDodger
Chat is a GREAT place to brainstorm kindling to start those discussion fires… and smoothly transition from the slow lane to the fast lane… from short term memory designed to be forgotten, over to long term memory saved for our future selves.
I still feel that making 1:1 feature comparisons misses the main difference between Discourse and Discord. Discord is building an ecosystem, a shared platform, and a main reason to start a community on Discord is because that’s where your prospective members are already. When you use Discourse you are building a dedicated independent space for your community. The hub app for Discourse is not offering an integrated platform experience.
So for all comunitities that don’t have a big member base in place already because of a product or service, the hard part when using Discourse is having members coming back and staying in the loop. That’s why it seems the time when chat makes an actual difference on Discourse, that’s when you are already out of the woods and managed to attract enough members who check in regularly.
What makes Discourse more competitive against ecosystem approaches like Discord in the first place are settings and features for keeping members involved that are easy to understand and customize. From my experience that’s really complex and difficult for community managers right now. E.g. there’s repeated feedback that Discourse doesn’t look modern enough out of the box. But did you ever try to make the the digest look modern? I’d love to be corrected, but I found that quite impossible or prohibitively expensive.
It’s not only the looks though, but the general adjustments when to send out messages and for whom that are not offered in an intuitive and simple way. To build a custom notification strategy, you currently need to be all over the place, from settings to groups to tags and categories.
To me Discourse would improve the most in comparision with community ecosystems if it could offer a more simple, intuitive and customizable solution to member involvement.
Do you have any examples of UIs that you think are modern? I just recommended Discourse to someone yesterday because it has a modern interface, but I’m in my 40s and am wondering if I’m missing a trend.
I thought of one more thing that helps discourse. You get all the same features in the browser compared to an app for it. WIth discord you cant have your status automatically update with what you are playing, automatically moved to an AFK VC and probably a few others I cant think of.
This may be often true, but is definitely not always true. I’d be curious in fact how often it is true. I know for myself that I have been involved in the early stages of numerous communities where they were asking themselves “Discord? Discourse? Both?” (along with other platform options also considered), and not once can I recall anyone saying “Well, Discord has a lot of people already” or “Many of our users are already on Discord”.
These communities are across a spectrum of activities, too, from an early-stage startup app community, to a YouTube channel’s “extended” community, to an open source collaboration project. The main factors in choosing Discord in every case were:
So I think again it would be a mistake to simply to see Discord and Discourse as taking different approaches and therefore serving different markets/audiences/purposes. This risks ignoring a very real potential challenge to Discourse’s continued adoption and success. I realize that’s not exactly what you’re saying, but some of what you’ve raised seems to play into that perspective that I think others have expressed.
I agree with this…
But absolutely not this. Chat is a reason to come back, chat is “sticky” in itself. Of course you need some critical mass to provide enough response quickly enough to new members such that it feels alive and worth returning to. But this is precisely what community builders do, and they can do it very effectively with a real time chat option in the same space as the forum.
Definitely agree here, this needs to get easier. That said if some of the other major issues - price/hosting complexity and mobile experience (notifications, iOS) in particular - are not solved, I don’t know if it will be enough.
Do you guys need to make something that solves large chat moderators’ problems, or something focused that will let you leverage what Discourse has to enable something special but more specific? It’s not really clear to me what Discourse is (supposed to be) best at, purely from a features perspective. Being self-hostable is a feature, of course. I’m reminded of Hypothes.is and Genius. They had big ambitions about annotating everything and anything, but became the most powerful only after they narrowed their focus (Hypothesis focuses on academics; Genius focuses on lyrics). I suppose Discourse has already had this decided for them over the years, fitting with the needs of tech and consumer communities best. I am most interested in using Discourse for academic purposes, and many of the design decisions feel like they were made with FAQ forums in mind.
It’s not even about “chats”. Chats are not really the same category of software as they used to be, nor are “forums” or “social media” (they’re converging in ways that make the distinction more misleading than not). Tapping into that is why Discord is so good:
Yeah. People hate Facebook and other old social media, but still come back to it grudgingly, because of chat (it’s usually older family members or acquaintances from a long time ago).
I wonder if Discourse chat could be modified to nudge this? I.e. each chat is killed/deleted after a set time, or perhaps only the last ten messages are kept per channel? This would force a decision point in the conversation – is this disposable chit chat, or is it something we might want to retain?
On a corporate level, we won’t be using Discourse chat as the hosting requirements create some legal minefields:
For me that has two possible separate emphasis.
Granted a single site can do both but I find that keeping them separate or at least segregated using categories makes sense.
Can you elaborate more, it doesn’t even have to agree with my thoughts.
My main Discourse site is for SWI-Prolog
I don’t want this to turn into a side discussion in public, so if you want feel free to send a private message.
