We already offer hosting in Australia on AWS but it’s not currently on our roadmap to offer colocated hosting in these locations because we are not seeing high demand. Is there a particular reason you would prefer local hosting over US or EU hosting?
Heh, the tricky thing about being globally distributed is that it’s very difficult to prioritise locations for these types of events. But I’m curious – what kind of event would bring enough value that you would travel to Sydney for it?
I am really passionate about this topic, I’m so glad you raised it. I wrote about my predictions pretty extensively here and what I think community builders should be thinking about here, while Mae shares advice for optimising community content for AI discovery here.
We have been spending a lot of time thinking about how we can better support Discourse communities to make flexible choices about how they leverage (and protect) their data.
Right now we’re pretty excited about Discourse MCP and you can keep an eye out here for future innovations.
Part of the launcher 2 work is shipping a pre-built docker image, so yes we have plans and you can already try it out in beta form
Regarding per user storage in themes. This is an area I have wanted to build for a VERY long time. I discussed this quite a few times over the years with @david. One of the biggest concerns here is ensuring there are proper constraints. We don’t want a bad theme to eat up terabytes of server side storage. Finding the right surface area is hard. I was just brainstorming a bit of this with GitHub helper. see: https://meta.discourse.org/discourse-ai/ai-bot/shared-ai-conversations/OjpV557puqmyvwFkEIcUvA
I like the idea of an API that optionally allows “preload” cause that can be game changing for theme developers.
Open Source is in the DNA of Discourse. We always wanted there to be an open alternative to the enormous amounts of closed source silos that are sadly taking over. We want our code to live far into the future and see instances of Discourse hosted us or self hosted as a positive.
The Open Source nature helps Discourse be more secure than many other alternatives cause people audit the code, it allows the platform to be extended in weird and wonderful ways.
We love interacting with the open source community and the wonderful contributors on meta
I love this question too, Jen. I have quite a few thoughts, some of which I share here. I think that smart community builders recognise that they do have an important role to play in managing how content is distributed and consumed. I suspect that may be challenging given your member-led governance structure. It can work – here is a case study of a community that was able to effectively scale communication under crowd-sourced governance, but they managed it strategically from the beginning.
Hi there! (11pm here ). Thanks for your How Discourse Uses Discourse , which I immediately shared with my colleagues. So just today one of them asked me after reading the blog post:
“Why don’t we use Discourse Chat like they do?”
(we use Discord for IM, which makes most people crazy, as our two communication platforms of choice are Discourse and Discord )
So my answer was:
“Basically because of the lack of push notifications, especially on self-hosted.”
So then I thought, maybe Discourse could do something with push notifications like they did with Discourse ID? Then I thought, probably not, this would jeopardise their hosting added value… But maybe it would be an interesting question for others anyway?
On my blog I warned a bit about possible downsides. So this is always an area that needs to be approached with caution.
That said, it is early days but I do highly recommend you try out (and watch) how Discourse Vibe evolves:
The AI agents are evolving in break neck speed and we are making sure that Discourse is able to provide the best context and tools so agents can perform their work well.
For example, recently we completed the trifecta of tools required to help agents have a proper build-test-build-test loop.
bin/rspec FILENAME to run any spec bin/lint FILENAME to lint any file (newish) bin/qunit FILENAME to run any qunit test (new)
On top of that we now ship a Discourse MCP which makes it easy for agents to produce test data and do manual testing.
On the subject of “AI making UI changes for me”
I have been experimenting with dv config theme to help kick off a sandbox for building themes but it is early days. I hope to get it into a state where it can do simple theme scaffolding.
I certainly see a future where self-serve customers can just point at a website and say “Hey, this is my website, make the forum look a bit more like it”
Search is one area I see evolving a lot as LLMs get cheaper and faster.
Putting an LLM in the critical path can be a bit tricky, cause search becomes anything but instant.
That said, people are happy to wait a bit to get great results as ask.discourse.com proves.
On the topic of “faster and better search”, I do see a combination of figuring out how to bring BM-25 into Discourse and how to use LLMS to inject concepts that handle some weird and wonderful spelling issues upfront (so you don’t call them while searching but do pre-processing instead)
There is nothing concrete on our roadmap, but a faster and better search is something we always strive for.
We sponsored a lot of work by @angus completed. @pmusaraj has been carefully testing progress along the way.
The plugin is now increadibly capable, I would love to see it adopted more widely and love to hear what great ideas the community have about its future.
I guess the question is headed back your way, what are the biggest gaps you have?
S3 compatible always comes with some level of compromise, is it really S3 compatible? Does it support signed direct uploads, for example, same lifecycle policy XML and the list goes on and on.
We try to make sure the basics work, but it can be an uphill battle given there are just so many “compatible” S3 providers that offer different levels of compatibility.
Proxy and CDN though are first class features, they can be fiddly to configure (especially proxies) cause you need to pass IPs along in a secure way and debugging can be hard.
This is certainly a value add we could look at adding to make Discourse ID more compelling. Part of this is a protocol challenge, especially on 3rd party sites.
We don’t want to store any private forum data, so perhaps some protocol that says: “Hey you have a new notification on site X” and then have the app lookup the notification from site X. Either that or some form of end to end encryption.
It is is tricky technical problem.
That said the Discourse PWA already supports Push Notifications on both iOS and Android.
It is really difficult to navigate growth in a healthy and resilient way. So many of our systems and processes grew organically as the business did. When there were 14 of us (as there were when I started) it was manageable to do everything with spreadsheets and emails. We had very little red tape or bureaucracy to negotiate. We could do things fast.
As you grow, you require more robust frameworks and that involves process. Some people struggle to acclimatise to that change more than others, but we want to take everyone on the journey. A good example is subsidiarising. We recently set up CDCK.BV in the Netherlands to employ all our EU personnel. That introduces a huge level of complexity that we didn’t have to deal with before. While there are definitely benefits to both the company and the individual, the amount of work involved is immense.
Similarly, scaling communication in a fully remote, async-first environment is challenging. Keeping the signal-noise ratio appropriately tuned is increasingly difficult.
Finding ways to solve challenges in a world that isn’t yet set up to work the way we do is hard. I don’t think we have overcome it, but we’re definitely working hard to drive change.
So sorry, I have struggled very hard to answer this one.
I guess if I rewind a bit, 5 years ago I expected Discourse to be a better community platform, and it indeed is.
I expect that in 5 years we are an even better community platform that adapts to the times and creates countless meaningful places online for people to gather and share interesting paragraphs
This has been fantastic! Thank you @sam and @hawk for your thoughtful answers yesterday. I have been looking forward to it all week as the questions were rolling in!
Everyone, please feel free to keep talking in here now that the live portion of the AMA has concluded. We’ll keep this topic open.
If you have any feedback about the format too, let us know. We’d like to do this again!
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Thank you