The importance of data ownership for community leaders

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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.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.discourse.org/2024/12/the-importance-of-data-ownership-for-community-leaders
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That’s 2 spaces, not 1 :wink: .

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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 :grey_question:

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.

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