# 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:** 18
**Author:** ![piffy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/piffy/32/254198_2.png) [@piffy](https://meta.discourse.org/u/piffy)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2024, 3:35pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-about-medium-tech/313207/18 "2024-06-24T15:35:35Z")
While I am always in favour of Discourse being as simple to install as possible, the primary problem is not on the supply side, but the demand side. I could spin up 200 Discourse instances overnight on range of different interest, but no one would ever use them because of limited discoverability and minimal general demand. Building a viable community feels like fighting against entropy. If you don’t pour a humongous amount of personal resources into keeping the place maintained and engaging, people will just go to Reddit/Facebook/Instagram/YouTube/TikTok that are highly engaging by default. When I go to public events in my hobby, the default question people ask is “what’s your insta?” because that’s the default window the hobby is viewed through unfortunately. I like Discourse/forums because the level of engagement is so much deeper. I’ve seen the equivalent of a “Topic” in an instagram story and it’s a joke in comparison. But the barrier to entry to move from instagram to that deeper level is something few cross, either out of ignorance or satisfaction a surface level interest that is satisfied by a social media site alone. In a way it’s a perfect filter to keep out low-value members, but simultaneously it keeps the community generally insular. So while it’s not something easy to do, the #1 place to shift the current paradigm as I see it is to reduce the instagram/Facebook/reddit → Discourse barrier. How? No idea. Maybe improved SEO or better hooking new users that stumble upon a Topic from a google search. A healthy balance is like 1 sysadmin user to 100-10,000 users. Making it easier for the one sysadmin users is far less a priority compared to making it more likely that 1000 people to register and use the platform. --- _[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-about-medium-tech/313207)._