What's Next for Discourse: Live AMA with Sam & Hawk

Announcements
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When: 2025-11-19T22:00:00Z→2025-11-20T04:00:00Z
Where: Right here on Meta

Discourse is hosting our own AMA!

We’re sitting down with CEOs @sam and @hawk to answer your questions about where Discourse is headed, what we’re building, and why we believe thoughtful, asynchronous communities are more important than ever.

:megaphone: If you can’t make it live, drop your questions below now. We’ll prioritize questions people find most interesting, so use those :heart: reactions liberally!

We’ll Be Answering Questions About…

Discourse ID - We’re excited to be announcing our new unified identity system that lets you use one login across any participating Discourse server. We’ll answer questions around functionality and what it means for your community and your users.

Our roadmap for the next 12 months - We’re excited to share what we’re building, what we’re prioritizing, and the strategic bets we’re making. From AI features that actually help humans to making Discourse even more accessible - we want your questions about where we’re going and when.

The bigger picture. Why do forums matter in 2025? How do we compete with ephemeral chat platforms? What does “owning your community” actually mean? And how will we keep building the best community software on the internet while staying true to our open-source roots?

How It Works

From 2025-11-19T22:00:00Z→2025-11-20T04:00:00Z, Discourse CEOs @sam and @hawk will be live in this topic answering your questions. Drop your questions in advance or join us live - we’ll tackle as many as we can in real-time and follow up on the rest.

Ask us about:

  • Product direction and feature priorities
  • Our open-source philosophy and business model
  • Technical decisions and AI strategy
  • Community building best practices
  • That feature request you’ve been waiting for
  • Literally anything else (within reason)

Discourse exists because of this community - builders, moderators, developers, and advocates who believe that meaningful online spaces require better tools. This is your chance to learn about what comes next.

See you there. Bring the hard questions!

AMA Rules:

  • Please only ask one question by replying to this topic a single time, using the Reply button at the bottom. It’s also helpful to scroll to the bottom while reading the topic to make sure nobody else has asked the same question first before you ask.
  • Please don’t ask more than one question so everyone gets a chance.
  • Please do not reply to anyone else’s post. The only purpose of replies on this topic is to ask the author one question. Please create a new topic if you’d like to discuss a related topic in more detail.

Posts not following these rules may be removed by moderators to keep the Q&A flowing smoothly. Thank you!

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As a self-hoster, I noticed Jeff Wong mentioned that compiling the launcher into a binary executable is a long-term goal, but that the first priority is improving the launcher script itself. Could you share a bit more about what the vision is for the launcher in the long run - for example, whether you’re aiming for a simpler, more portable setup experience for self-hosters (perhaps moving away from the current Bash-based flow)? - and, for Ubuntu self-hosters like me, would those changes mainly improve portability, or also bring UX and reliability gains for existing Linux users?

As i’m always in the UK not the USA, i might be around for the first hour…

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What’s currently happening with AI moderation, and what’s on the roadmap? I saw Sam’s Experiments with AI based moderation on Discourse Meta thread, but it fizzled out in May. How does AI moderation stack up against other features on the roadmap?

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Firstly it’s great to see Discourse going from strength to strength - congrats to all of the team :tada:

I do have some concerns about Discourse ID which I have have aired previously, so my question is how will you protect the memberbase of forum admins you obtain via Discourse ID?

Here’s what I said in one of my previous posts:

If you’ll be obtaining:

  • Email addresses of users
  • Forums they have connected their IDs to

Then this data will be incredibly valuable to anyone who wants to compete with forums that Discourse admins run today - even if that is not your intention it could well be of whoever ends up with Discourse.

If you do decide to go ahead with Discourse ID can you offer any guarantees that Discourse, or this data, will never be sold?

If you have time for any other questions:

  • What have your most memorable Discourse moments been?

  • Where is Jeff? Haven’t seen him around here for ages!

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Unfortunately because of timezones, I won’t be able to attend, but I do have a few things I’d love to know more about.

  1. What’s the plans for pre-built Docker images? This would be a great feature.
  2. Are there any plans to allow user fields creation in themes?
  3. Why do you guys feel compelled to contribute to open-source?

Thanks!

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I’d like to know if there’s still any work planned for the instant search, or if that’s included in your 12-month roadmap?

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I would have questions about the commercial side. Discourse has been my role model to sustainable opensource project for years. Knowing how to make money for everyone here is the key.

I’d like to ask about your thoughts about local commercial partnerships. So I guess there are a few folks here in Europe who are pretty active and there is a potential for them even making some money for their efforts. I guess today if you are not Discourse, you can make some money by

  • charging for creating themes and plugins, but as with any platform, everything gets included in the core after some time, leaving not so much space for custom development (like in the beginnings)
  • hosting but I think Discourse hosting is really good, so I could think about some referral fees here
  • commercial consultancy and support (not sure but I think I am one of a few from the community who uses Discourse mainly as a business solution) – again, some tools, possibly referral fees for suggesting CDCK commercial support would work here

Is CDCK thinking about building some kind of ambassador network? That would be another way how to create some kind of support for people really interested in Discourse. Kind of easy for CDCK (just listing them somewhere officially as companies don’t care what number of cheers we have here on Meta) and quite helpful for the individuals (gives them a special status in their local countries). But helping both bringing Discourse to more customers in the end.

Thanks!

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When support for social groups within a community is planned (as in the invision community)

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First I would strongly support the question from @tvavrda about local commercial partnerships, e.g. with consulting and support services and maybe also some european-based hosting. I believe there is a large and not yet exhausted potential for Discourse. Currently digital sovereignity is a big buzzword in the european media. We would need more efforts to spread the information about the Discourse project. And we should spread the news among commercial, non-commercial and political communities across Europe (also on the EU Level). They could be both potential customers/users and possible funding options.

My own question: I would like to know more about future plans for interconnections between Discourse instances from/into the growing Fediverse ecosystem. There is already some excellent coding groundwork by @angus with the ActivityPub plugin. What are the future plans for this plugin? Are there any further ideas for links between fediverse applications (such as mastodon, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon\_(social_network) and Discourse? I saw that Jeff Atwood is posting about mastodon (Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror@infosec.exchange) - Infosec Exchange) See also the discussions at https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/ (where @angus is the acting moderator.

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Wonderful to have this happening during waking hours for those in this half of the globe!

If and when are you going to offer hosting based in Australia and/or New Zealand?

And closely related, when are we going to have a Discourse in person get-together in either Sydney or Auckland?

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Discourse is already incredibly customizable - but much of that customization still depends on developer knowledge, like working with theme components or plugin outlets.

Do you see a future where AI plays a larger role in that process?

For example, could we one day ask an AI assistant to “create a theme component that uses a plugin outlet to display XYZ,” and have it scaffold or even deploy that customization directly - with an understanding of the forum’s existing style and setup?

And beyond code-level customization, I’m curious how you imagine AI supporting admins or community managers more generally - things like asking, “update this setting,” or “adjust the design of this page so that…” and having Discourse intelligently make those changes.

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Hi Sam, thanks for doing this. I run Discourse behind a reverse proxy, with login-required and R2 (S3-compatible) for uploads. This combo often needs extra fixes after upgrades (mixed content, real IP, rate limits). Is Discourse planning to make these “proxy + CDN + S3-compatible” installs smoother in core, or is that expected to stay an ops-side responsibility?

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I believe that communities will undergo a major transformation in the coming years with the advent of Artificial Intelligence. In particular, communities that fail to keep pace with artificial intelligence may eventually disappear. As artificial intelligence advances, communities may not survive in the long term. My prediction is that the concept of community will evolve into a structure that differs significantly from today’s understanding and will undergo significant change. Of course, I should also mention that no matter how much AI advances, real people will still need to share and exchange experiences. What I’m curious about is Discourse’s future plans, given that Discourse hosts many large communities around the world. What do you foresee? What innovations related to AI are you considering bringing to Discourse?

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I administer a Discourse instance for a nationwide member-led, member-funded organization with about 200 chapters across the country. Our forum is the only closed communication space available to all members, so a lot of our historical documents and resource materials are available there, and it’s the only place to access this information since it is behind a login and made members-only.

Consequently, we have a fair number of users who join the forum in order to access this information, or who are curious about the discussion, who are not at all used to forums and how to navigate them. For the most part, these users have only ever been exposed to social media and the dreaded algorithm, and having content served to them in a way to maximize engagement, good or bad (usually bad, let’s be real).

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot, and I’m wondering if either of you have thoughts on it, are the obligations we have as users to curate our experiences on a forum rather than relying on others to feed content to us. Forums offer a firehose of information, and it’s all laid bare - and while admins and devs can help make navigation easier, it really is up to users to decide for themselves what they want and don’t want to see.

As more and more people are becoming disenchanted with corporate social media but don’t have familiarity with forums, how do we more gently onboard these folks to this concept? I think I’m asking more in the philosophical or abstract sense, rather than a specific list of features.

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