You can:
-
Create your first admin user with
rake admin:create -
Log into Discourse and configure
-
Enable only social logins that send confirmed emails (Google, Discord, Facebook, etc)
That will give you a somewhat working Discourse. Users can enable push notifications to get a nudge when someone replies, mention, etc.
You will lose email notifications, summary emails and stuff like that, and that can range from giving you just 5% less visits to killing your site because people forget to visits back. Depends on the community type.
Good luck, and I hope it works for you.