Certainly interests and topics are important to my users aswell. A lot of the more traditional community platforms offer built-in functionality with users near me and events, etc, but I am going to use discourse for this with some plugins and customization.
I really like the location plugin from pavilion (I think now maintained by discourse?), i’m going to be installing that and seeing how it works! I really think discourse could actually be the best platform for location-based posts or even integrate with amateur radio in some interesting ways. I’ll be sure to share if I figure out some cool stuff.
My community also has a ton to discuss regarding amateur radio antennas, power supplies, setups, how-to, etc etc. that is more down the middle use case for discourse and not linked to location. So I’m planning to keep the location-based conversations in a single Category and use the location plugin to tag locations there.