Discourse Community or App

General
1

All,

Background: A few months ago I participated in a very wonderful retreat.

I was able to talk to the business owner who is looking for a more active way to support engagement and continued support to participants.

When we initially discussed this, the owner had recommendations for using discord.

My chief concern there and my recommendation was this would be really no different than the current option which is WhatsApp groups.

When you are there you are all in the same time and space and generally doing activities together.

Once you leave, you are all in your own time and space and have your individual needs. You want to be connected when you want to be connected and, as my experience with these things also tells me, rarely do you meet up in space either visually or verbally.

I suggested discourse. I am by no means an expert, but I understand the basics and have actually built a community for practice. It was a scenario in some way similar to this where people expressed an interest in staying together, but well, human nature is human nature and people float away after a while.

fast forward to now and the owner has told me they are considering an app.

Truthfully this is the last thing I would recommend and thus I need to be clear that I am thoroughly against it so that is why I was never a sales person as I need to believe in something (well, maybe I could sell discourse)

I personally think discourse is the way to go. The long-time developers have done the heavy lifting so the people with little or no technical experience (business owner) and/or the people with technical experience (in a different area) and critical path thought can provide a robust experience rather quickly and focus on content. No need for cross platform matchy matchy and all that.

No development cost, just hosting costs.

I have stated my opinion to the owner and they are still considering.

As I said I am biased. My hope there are people here with real world experience of both experiences to provide a more robust pros and cons list for their consideration.

TIA

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2

Hi there – what do you mean by an app? Are they planning to build something from scratch?

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3

An app for iPhone or android. Something you would find in google play or the apple App Store.

To be honest I did not ask, but assumed. I can go back and ask for sure.

From my conversations it seems as if maybe a larger percentage of people who do the retreat are more techie oriented.

In our first conversation it was mentioned several people had suggested discord. That is great if you are in a project group or gaming, etc. But for most of the world once you leave the location, life is much more asynchronous.

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4

You can have both with Discourse.

At the very least you can send users a link and they can open the community at first in their browser, but modern phones will now prompt a user to install it on their homepage because Discourse is a Progressive Web App.

Once they’ve clicked on install and given the phone permission, the Discourse community will appear on their phone as if it is an app and as you may know Discourse pretty much feels like an app in use in any case.

Users will even receive push notifications!

This means you do not have to go to the trouble and expense of deploying to the app stores.

However, it is also possible to deploy a wrapped version to the app stores if you really want to, but this will require a freelancer to help you with that step.

And that’s not all!

There’s the official Hub app which is already on the app stores and allows you to add several communities at once and makes for a nice way to keep a collection of useful Discourse sites you regularly visit. However, it is not branded uniquely as you could do with your own app.

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