First and foremost, great response! Passionate and dedicated builders like you are a big part of the success of Discourse to date. That said the entire point of this topic is questioning whether CDCK - and its broader mission - might be better served with a broader focus to attract people that aren’t so intrinsically inclined in the way you are.
Unfortunately that does appear to be what a lot of people setting up community do focus on. It’s wonderful that you and many others here at Meta actually focus on community needs first, but it’s basically “preaching to the converted” if the selling point is “community first”. If the goal is - in part - to make the creation of good communities (from a technical perspective) easier and more attractive, then some amount of selling to people who don’t innately prioritize community will have to be done, IMO. The rapid growth of Circle.so and similar platforms illustrates that for many people their strategy is working. If Discourse is meant to be primarily just for community builders who already prioritize community first and foremost, that’s valid too, but it feels to me like a distinctly narrower and less potentially world-changing vision.
It’s good that they’ve successfully sold to you and people like you. But is that enough? Is it the kind of success and impact they aspire to, or at least could?
That’s not “the” alternative though. That’s one extreme alternative, of course. But a middleground is also certainly possible: build use cases, “wizards”, and other tools into the existing Discourse to help people realize and implement/deploy its potential. In a sense this middleground is possible because Discourse is so flexible, whereas a platform like Circle may be designed to be more appealing for certain use cases out of the box, but couldn’t show you and give you the option of the variety of use cases, layouts, etc. that Discourse could (if such features/tools were built; what I’m saying is the underlying flexibility allows this whereas Circle does not seem to).
Why do you think they and Circle are doing this though? Are they just bad at business? Is it failing to make them successful? Or is it making them successful and if so are there things that can be taken from that to make Discourse more successful while not losing its mission, flexibility, etc?
I harken back to statements made in the blog post for their last funding round in Q3 2021:
Do you think that describes Discourse today?