I’m an avid open source advocate and the director of a medium-sized nonprofit ($2m / year budget) with a sizable member community (~1k people). I really, really wanted to be able to choose Discourse for our online community. In the end I just couldn’t justify the investment that Discourse would require and we’re going with Circle.
To illustrate how much I wanted Discourse to work, I spent probably 12 hours researching and attempting to implement a simpler interface for us to demo. I read through this enormous thread and others like it hoping that someone internal would have heard the message @oshyan has been trying to share and created a way for potential customers to demo an instance that would hold a candle to Circle’s familiarity to our organization’s general-audience members. I made hardly any progress, and I’m relatively technical (former web dev ~5 years ago). That was an expensive attempt (payroll cost equivalent to three months of the hosted enterprise plan) and I had to cut it off eventually.
I would be delighted to eventually be able to move our community to a platform like Discourse where we’d have much better ownership of our data and have the option of self hosting if / when our platform is enshittified or shut down. @mcwumbly I’d be happy to answer questions or provide an interview if anyone internally would like to understand our trial and evaluation process and why potential customers (even ones with a strong bias in favor of Discourse) are choosing Circle instead.