It’s maybe worth noting that my own interest is in promoting the idea of being an active participant on the internet - that you can rent a VPS for $10/month and do stuff with it. One thing you can do is setup a Discourse forum, but specifically promoting Discourse is kind of out of my hands.
That said, if I was trying to market Discourse to a wider audience, I wouldn’t compromise on price. Instead, I’d make it clear how Discourse makes money - that it’s open source software that you can install yourself. Make it as easy as possible for people to install it. If they don’t want to deal with that, they can have a hosted site for $x/month. They can move between the hosted and self-hosted options any time they wish.
Here’s a good defense of the idea of not trying to compete with big tech on price: Quality software deserves your hard‑earned cash — Steph Ango.
I’d also make it clear that Discourse doesn’t own or sell your data. Contrast this with what you get from Facebook/Reddit.*
It is. I wrote about the idea that Discourse should develop templates that are designed to solve specific problems here: Why isn't Discourse more frequently recommended as a "community platform"? - #127 by simon. This could be done on a per-problem basis:
- Identify the problem your trying to solve. For example discussions, with a possible emphasis on contentious discussions.
- Identify the target audience. For example, academics, NGOs, government organizations, neighborhood organizations, large Twitter accounts and Facebook groups, etc.
- Create a demo site and a Ruby script (template) that can be used to spin up pre-configured sites.
- Market the heck out of it.
I could be wrong about this, but it also seems low risk. It’s not asking for features to be added to Discourse. I know marketing campaigns can get expensive though.
*[If it was ~6 months from now, I’d link to “Simon’s Discourse Archiver” app to demonstrate that your data could be converted to a static HTML site if you ever wanted to stop using Discourse.]