What about medium tech?

[bloomexperiment (Tracey)]

@Jagster

Creating an environment never creates content/discussion. There must be demand first.

@piffy

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.

I still think that an important aspect of Instagram/Facebook/Reddit etc. being the default spaces is that that’s where admins (including non-technical admins and moderators) choose to set up and develop their communities in the first place, in the case of Facebook, Reddit and Discord for example.

Registering and using Discourse as a user is already much easier than setting up Discourse as an admin. I have a lot more trouble convincing other non-technical moderators/community managers to choose to set up a Discourse forum over other platforms, than to get people to sign onto existing Discourse forums.

@Jagster

Discourse has not any bigger barrier techwise why new admins couldn’t start use it.

See this again:

The Evil Bouncy Castle of Settings and Customize

Let me tell you a story… It was about a year ago, and I was in the process of setting up my very first Discourse forum, finally migrating my phpBB database from 2007 towards something more appropriate to the current decade, thanks to @awesomerobot’s recommendation. The sysadmin just handed over the keys after having done the first half of the wizard (before it tells you to “jump in!”) and now it was my turn to actually set it up for good. I went to the admin panel and opened the settings. The f…