A community’s data is more than just numbers and names; it reflects the community’s pulse—what members care about, discuss, and engage with. This data includes all of the knowledge generated through those discussions which should be a lasting resource, always accessible to your community. However, many platforms make it difficult to access your community’s history, or even limit how much history you can access, hindering your ability to retain and leverage valuable insights. Others may prevent you from taking your data with you if you decide to move. Choosing the right platform from the start helps you future-proof your community.
I’m a huge fan of Discourse for the very reason discussed –
data ownership by community leaders and not by the platform (Discourse communities can easily migrate to self-hosting or even other platforms)
users’ ease of access in exporting their own data
But I was surprised that neither of these Discourse features seems to be mentioned in the blog post
For example, Discord etc doesn’t even have the ability to export your community’s data. When someone deletes their server, no one has access to any of their own content, and you can’t keep a backup of the server anywhere to be able to restore it again one day. And on other platforms, if you want to request your data, you have to write and ask for it – there’s no automated process.
On Discourse, you can export your whole forum in a backup archive and then easily restore it at any time. You can also use migration scripts to restore the data on another forum platform too if you wish.
And users can easily get an export of their own posts in CSV on Discourse without waiting for any staff member to reply.
These features are Discourse’s greatest features on this topic of discussion – so I think it would be great to see more elaboration on them in this blog post too, or a future one.
I completely agree with this article as it particularly resonates with my personal experience. My biggest regret today is precisely not having created an independent platform like Discourse from the beginning of my journey.
In 2011, I launched a Facebook page dedicated to animal welfare. Success came quickly and impressively: hundreds of thousands of people rallied to this cause, creating a dynamic and engaged community. Interactions were numerous, discussions were enriching, and member participation was extraordinary.
Unfortunately, in recent years, all this momentum has collapsed. My posts, which once reached thousands of people, now only gather about ten “likes”. Participation has become almost non-existent. The most frustrating part? To regain even a bit of visibility, I’m now forced to sponsor my posts.
Years of hard work and a vibrant community have thus evaporated, trapped by Facebook’s algorithms and commercial policy. If I had to do it all over again, I would create my own independent platform without hesitation to preserve this beautiful community and maintain control over our interactions.
Totally off topic, but you did wrong choise back then. Pages are always be catastrophic failure and the major reason was the fact that pages has practically zero visibility without worded participation. Groups are totally different story.
But about data ownership — trying to get images from Instagram…
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