I’ll try to make this brief. First, it seems quite similar to much of what was covered in the already-linked Why isn’t Discourse more frequently recommended as a “community platform”? topic. I want to highlight two things from my merely anecdotal but still perhaps relevant experience of late:
- My Facebook feed has become a virtual ghost town in the last ~6 months or so. There are maybe 5 people still actively posting, the rest all left, many of them for no viable alternative (Instagram most commonly, but that is not Facebook-like or much of a “community” platform, really). Many people likewise are abandoning Twitter/X because of Musk and/or the impact of his directional and feature choices, etc. There is some demand for alternatives.
- People are spinning up new communities all the time, with their own reasons and inspirations for how they will get users. Many just do it with Discord these days, it’s free, makes sense. But some will pay, and in those cases many choose other platforms than Discourse, often I think because of a desire to charge for access, which Discourse seems less well-suited for than e.g. Circle.
So basically: Facebook and Twitter are not inevitable and unassailable, and even if they were, smaller communities are still being started all the time despite the “cold start” problem (leave that to the admins and their inspirations!). And yet Discourse is still so seldom in the conversation when these little communities are being built, in my anecdotal experience. There has to be reasons…