# What about medium tech? **URL:** \ **Category:** Community Building\ **Created:** [June 22, 2024, 5:23pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-about-medium-tech/313207 "2024-06-22T17:23:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 15
**Author:** ![traceymoko](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/traceymoko/32/483235_2.png) [@traceymoko](https://meta.discourse.org/u/traceymoko)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2024, 11:23am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-about-medium-tech/313207/15 "2024-06-24T11:23:10Z")
# Improving technical barriers, for non-technical people > [@simon](#): > > What’s interesting is that Discourse meets the criteria of the proposed solution _and_ that an educated group of people didn’t seem to be aware of platforms like Discourse or the open source ecosystem. That got me wondering if we’re being a bit too quiet about it. How can non-technical people be made aware that there are viable alternatives to Facebook and Twitter? I think it’s a good way of framing it. I would say that there are two main technical barriers to Discourse: - administration - installation/hosting There are various other topics & posts discussing the administration barriers. So i’ll focus on the hosting. # Mitigating hosting technical barriers For non-technical people, self-hosting isn’t a likely option, so they’d opt to have someone else to host it for them. (For centralised services, they all offer the hosting.) ## Improving built-in crowdfunding on Discourse Putting aside ideas for changes to business models for now, for people with smaller communities to be willing to try paying a higher price on Discourse’s hosting, I think having a more robust built-in crowdfunding could help to offset the costs in the long-term. Improving out-of-the-box crowdfunding (like built-in members on Ghost—which is also successful medium tech open-source software which sells hosting as a service—or boosting servers on Discord which is centralised software) for Discourse forums could encourage more non-technical people to see it as an option in the long-term. Right now funding methods can be done with plugins (official plugins too, if i recall correctly) but it’s not in core. For improving the crowdfunding, i mean having an easier built-in system where - admins can set up payment methods by default within Discourse (like I can do this in Ghost) - users can pay and be automatically added to groups with avatar flair, custom titles etc. or get access to categories for Q&A and so on ## Highlight content creators & communities on Discourse Maybe if Discourse can do collaborations with content creators who move to the platform (e.g. I think there would be some on [free.discourse.group](http://free.discourse.group)), who could talk about how great the platform is compared to other sites they’ve used, it would also encourage more non-technical people to try it for their own communities. ## Highlight best of Discourse against pain points of big tech For larger non-technical communities, I definitely wish people would use Discourse instead of jumping to Discord and leaving the rest to Reddit, which is pretty much what happens. Here again the question of non-technical people is important because e.g. a lot of the sites on Discourse Discover are technical at the moment. I think the key is to really compete aggressively against the pain points of Discord and Reddit and Twitter & FB, and highlight the very best of Discourse. E,g. - reddit isn’t good for extended discussion (pain point) - the fact that you can’t really follow most of what’s going on discord once you reach a few thousand people in a server unless you have a bunch of moderators active at certain times of day (pain point) - the fact that you can have conversations on Discourse that you can join regardless of timing. You can join in discussions that happened earlier in the week or years ago, and do it very fluidly. - With discord, if a conversation happened 2 months ago and there are thousands of replies since, you would be seen as very, very awkward if you tried to a reply to a message from 2 months ago. Again as an example, Ghost also does this (try to compete aggressively): > **[Ghost alternatives – See how Ghost compares to the rest](https://ghost.org/alternatives/)** > > Considering switching to Ghost? You're probably trying to figure out whether it will be the right decision for you. Find out how Ghost compares to others. --- _[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-about-medium-tech/313207)._