Continuing the discussion from Maybe just remove the "Community" header in the sidebar? (A plea!):
I saw this quote as I’ve just switched to have community as the subdomain of my forum and also been debating how to refer to it when talking with others. Is it The Community? Is it The Community Forum? Is it The Forum?
I’d really be curious to hear about people’s perspectives on the nuances of it being a community, a forum, or however else people refer to their Discourse instances.
Both is a forum and a community.
In my view, Discourse is a tool for a community to use. It isn’t the community — those are the people themselves and all the relationships amongst them all. So, yeah, our site is discourse.julialang.org and it’s just the Julia discourse.
But other communities might not have as much of a external unifying focus that goes beyond the site — which would then make the site itself more akin to the community.
Arguably, in that case there isn’t actually a community. Just a collection of people. But “community” sounds better, so…
Based on the self-branding, the word “forum” doesn’t seem relevant. Which makes sense since the word is pretty antiquated and carries a bit of baggage.
Maybe a Discourse is a “discourse” the same way a Discord server is a “discord”
In my experience this often has to be phrased as “Discourse, not DIscord. It’s a different thing. And actually Discourse was there first.”
Which is not very concise.
For what it’s worth, I say “forum” or “discussion forum”.
I named discussion.fedoraproject.org that from an old sysadmin rule of “never name a service after the software”. But, the folks from discourse.gnome.org told me they picked that on purpose because they want to highlight and give credit to another open source project — which is a fair point.
In my experience, where my audience tends to be between 20-35 years old, many will say that forums are “for boomers” or will not even have a concept of how they are supposed to work.
I think tech communities will have a different relationship to the word. For “normal” people who have only seen internet communities though Reddit/Facebook/Instagram/Discord, a forum is a pretty foreign concept.
To me it is really both. A forum aka BBS is empty if there is no community.
I think it comes down to perspective and what moniker one prefers.
Plus if someone running a forum wants to change community moniker to something else they can.
Even a simpler grease monkey script can be used externally to “theme” a forum to some extend it the forum is not yours to change
Allow me to quote from Clay Shirky’s “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy”:
We cannot separate the technological aspects from the social aspects of running a virtual world.
This produces potentially not-very-satisfying answers, I’m afraid. There are plenty of Discourse instances without people, which don’t exactly count as “community”. And most internet communities exist outside of Discourse instances[1]. But when you have Discourse + a group of people, the word “community” applies to the whole. It also applies to just the people and in some cases, it can apply to just the software too.
Truth is “community” is just a label we apply to a group of people. Where is that group? You might find the group under a menu item that’s labeled:
That label might even be aspirational. The point is you need some way to let people know where to connect with other like-minded people. You might want to reserve “community” for just the people in the group and that’s a fine instinct. But it’s not helpful if that insistence prevents people from finding their group.
I’ve been on a little crusade against the “community everywhere” concept:
It feels like a trap to look at people who are gathered on a variety of platforms as if they are part of a larger community. Communities are fractal and they do overlap, but that doesn’t mean you can slap the “community” label on a large swath of groups that are only connected by a common interest. It’s not unusual for people to deliberately chose one platform and ignore others. Nothing wrong with reaching out to people who aren’t using your platform, but respect your community and other people’s communities.
For a large forum, it might not even be appropriate to call it “community”-singular. Oftentimes I find myself talking about the “forums”, meaning one Discourse instance with loosely defined sub-communities. Because social and technical considerations can’t be separated, these subcommunities often congregate in specific categories.
Indeed, “community” properly shouldn’t be used for people who visit once in a while and never connect with anyone else.
Unfortunately. ↩︎
