Let’s use this topic to share our favorite Discourse sites! Share the link, tell us about the site, how long you’ve been part of it, and what you like about it.
12 Mi Piace
Alright, I’ll go first. I’m (To)biased, and obviously https://meta.discourse.org is my favorite Discourse site! It’s the first Discourse site I joined and I have been continuously active here since 2014. I love hanging out with my friends and fellow Discourse afficionados here, many who have also been here for many years. I also really like how the team is open to good suggestions and it always gives me a boost when ideas I suggested or contributed to improving make it into our software.
Two other sites I visit daily are private, member only communities. One is for my extended family where I enjoy sharing links and stories, and collaborating on projects. It’s amazing how that site has become my memory for when I need to recall when I last changed the water filter or where we went on holiday in 2022.
The other is a site I set up for my local neighborhood, migrated many years ago from a yahoo group I created way back before I even knew about Discourse. That site gives me great comfort because I can always use it to reach out to neighbors when one of my cats goes missing or if I need help with something and will always know that helpful neighbors will quickly respond. It’s become a lifeline for me and everyone in my local community.
There are more sites I’m involved in but I’ll leave it here for now and see what others come up with!
11 Mi Piace
If you want to avoid real estate mistakes then you are going to love this new community (Property Success With NEW KIDS) primarily for Kiwis and Aussies. But now after 7 months testing perhaps the rest of the world wants this too?
Big, big thanks to all the people at discourse we couldn’t have done this without you.
8 Mi Piace
My favorite discourse sites are the gimkit creative forums and the prodigy forum. I’ve been a part of the prodigy forum since may 18, 2025 and I like it because of how nice the people are there (sometimes) and because you don’t get flagged as off topic for almost everything that is even slightly off-topic. I have been a part of the gimkit creative forum for a while but my account join date is june 12, 2025. I like it because [most] people are nice there[1] and because of how the mods always help out and also because I still have links to lots of spam or off-topic topics.
not saying names ↩︎
4 Mi Piace
I do spend quite a bit of time here on Meta, so I think it’s fair to say, that I like it here 
But apart from that - and I think I mentioned it elsewhere already - I like the StayForever community (StayForever is a German podcast about retro games). First, it has this nicely customised category view with great pixel art. And second, the atmosphere there is usually quite relaxed, and people are also welcoming towards newcomers.
9 Mi Piace
Shout out to a couple of the first Discourse forums I spent a lot of time in, and led me to choose Discourse for my own project:
- The Obsidian Forum is nicely organized, full of helpful people, and has an on-brand purple-on-black theme with pops of bright, primary colors.
- The Kirby CMS forum makes it easy to find tech help from a very supportive team and community, and to organize complex topics with code blocks and cross-references.
11 Mi Piace
I’ve been in the dark gaming forum the longest, and it’s an alright place. Gimkit creative forum is a honorable mention but people go off-topic a lot (and some controversial stuff happened lately)
However, I think the most important forum is this forum, discourse meta, because without it, I would not be posting this reply.
2 Mi Piace
Even I haven’t time to be loggin I’m reading lurking this
My local faves are these
3 Mi Piace
Ich nutze gerne ein deutsches Forum welches sich über Bitcoin und anderen Coins unterhält. Das Design ist in meinen Augen sehr ansprechend.
Ansonsten hier im Meta 
2 Mi Piace
I’d say the same thing about the Joplin community. Really healthy community that seems to foster a lot of participation in the app.
4 Mi Piace
This topic makes me notice that while I come across many Discourse instances in the wild, the only ones I actually post in are meta.discourse.org and my own forums.
So I don’t really have a “favourite one” in terms of features, design or even community/activity.
I’d say that my favourite Discourse sites are the ones I migrated (whether I’m active on or not) that are all ancient forums, some more than 20 years old.
My main forum (unicyclist.com) even has content as old as 1993 (imported from newsgroups hosted by the original admin) that is still available. Discourse is one of the essential links in the software migration chain that allows communities continue to exist online even after more than 30 years.
9 Mi Piace
I love stories like these.
3 Mi Piace
I really like that concept! And it’s true! It’s like a Noah’s Ark for communities except that there are huge numbers of them! 
4 Mi Piace
I don’t have a favourite Discourse instance as such (although ATM I am particularly loving journalling in my own personal Discourse instance, which I am planning on writing about for a Community piece soon)
But over the past decade of using Discourse I’ve enjoyed watching to see how many new products, services, communities and teams are using Discourse - from Neural DSP to NHS Digital Developers to Caddy to the International Guild of Knot Tyers …
I love how the fact Discourse tends to be set up on a subdomain means that you can often predict that forum.somecompany.com will likely be a Discourse - and then when you see the ‘dancing dots’ you know straight away. Even Discourses that have been very heavily skinned and tweaked are still recognisably Discourses.
5 Mi Piace
I can’t help but relate to this. Most times when I see the ‘Forum’ on ‘Community’ tab, it’s Discourse. Once, I even took a guess and appended community. to the start of a URL to a friend of mine to show that Discourse was seemingly everywhere, and guess what? It was a Discourse forum!
4 Mi Piace
My fav Discourse sites were forum.gethopscotch.com and disco.auxy.co
On the Hopscotch forum, it was just such a lovely community that really pushed the boundaries of Hopscotch (iOS drag-and-drop coding app for kids). Both the spirit of Hopscotch and Discourse were so vibrantly alive in the forum, and this was highly influential on me — so much so that you can really trace it to this day in me as a person. I was very active there and loved to share tips and tricks from my coding projects – often writing really in-depth explanations. Hopscotch and the forum were very close to my heart (I ended up working at Hopscotch later on and I was also admin/moderator on the forum.)
With Auxy Disco, it was another Discourse community for a super cool and intuitive iOS app – Auxy, the music-making app. I was much less visible on there – more of a lurker, due to my music abilities not being as developed as my coding abilities – but I picked up so many tips from other people, because people would share their projects like the Hopscotch community did and people would talk about the music-making process.
Unfortunately Auxy Disco was shut down, and the Hopscotch forum is now read-only with the community transitioning to Discord instead (and most of the forum is not currently publicly visible anymore)
And you can say that’s this is very Discourse-y of me, but I have NEVER EVER recovered from this. I’m a Person of Many Paragraphs, and I could be that way — and was encouraged to be that way — because of Discourse. And nowadays online, everywhere I am, people elsewhere find it too hard to read everything that I write because I write paragraph after paragraph and other platforms are just not built for that kind of thing. It’s very sad.
Another friendly community that I enjoy browsing occasionally now is IntFiction:
They are a community of interactive fiction writers. They’re also very verbose people like me, so I like that, but again, game design & creative writing are less developed skills for me compared my other primary domains, so I’m not as active on there.
Yeah I wish there were many more Discourse sites in the wild (and have tried to start some more of my own) but unfortunately a lot of people seem to be trying to really push for proprietary platforms like Discord and Reddit these days…
2 Mi Piace