Why isn't Discourse more frequently recommended as a "community platform"?

[bloomexperiment (Tracey)]

I think some part of it is that Discourse has been more willing to make platform choices that don’t necessarily work purely in favour of increasing its popularity, but align better with specific models that it has wanted to see in the world.

I noticed that two of the aspects of Discord/Twitter/Facebook etc. being widely recommended over the years (i.e. teacher would tell us to make accounts for class or self-promo, or someone tells you it’s the only way to keep in touch with a group) are because:

• they’re centralized
  • you don’t have to create a new account for each server/group you join (on Discord, Facebook), you can maintain contact with all your friends in DMs, ‘everyone’ is on them
• they allow you to get started right away for free

@justin

I love the fact that Discourse isn’t a centralized platform (it’s one of the reasons I work here), and because of that creators can own their community area and not be tied into the shifting sands of mass-market or proprietary SaaS software (though there are solid reasons to use them depending on use case).

I also love this aspect about Discourse – that it’s decentralized. Though less popularity as a platform is probably one of the tradeoffs – friction with creating new accounts each time.

This is probably also the case with there not being a way to start a small community “immediately and completely free” (“race to the bottom”) on Discourse, without some self-hosting maintenance. I also think this was just another case where less popularity was a trade-off.

• i.e. choosing a model other than “race to the bottom” that allowed it to balance customer support & development (Discourse team for a long time has had a high proportion of engineers compared to most other places I’ve seen, in passing. I think “free as in race-to-the-bottom” requires a lot of customer support)

The wins you get with Discourse being free and open-source – complete customisation over the look and feel, custom plugins, etc. — are more important if you already have a community going.

Having 0 mins to get started (vs. 15 mins to get started + hosting for Discourse) would be an edge for other platforms. Discourse scales great for larger discussions and larger communities. But if people get started with their communities on the other platforms due to less friction, there’s less chance they’ll migrate to Discourse — even if it were the single best platform for larger communities — because migration comes with more resistance.

I’ve always been the only one in my real-life circles waving the Discourse flag when people ask where to put their community, or when I try to set up my own and try to get people to join – so that’s kind of what I’ve observed for the resistance to it.

E.g. I’ve also tried for an online open source project I worked on, as a fan project for video game. I make a Discourse forum and I got like 5 people join over the first 2 years. I make a Discord group and 100s join because they already have a Discord account – at similar stages where the Discourse had more content than the Discord.

Maybe these will evolve in future if Discourse chooses to prioritise popularity after having been able to develop the product for so long. Those are just the main things I can think of, for the question in the heading. It’s not really about good/bad to me i.e. popularity good/bad – it’s just prioritizations and trade-offs.

[schneeland]

A lot of good points have been raised already, but I thought, I’ll still add my 2 cents here.

Having analyzed the current forum software landscape as part of a migration project for a medium-sized community focused on gaming topics, I feel it doesn’t look too bad for Discourse - both because of reduced competition (e.g. XenForo seems to be struggling with development right now) and because it has a number of useful qualities. At the same time, there are a number of factors that make adoption of Discourse as a community platform harder than it needs to be IMO.

Maybe to start with the positive things:

(Major)

• Open source project with continuous development and a healthy community (both the amount of support provided here on meta and the willingness to accept pull requests are good signs IMO)
• Available both for self-hosting and as a hosted service - both with equal feature sets (at least as far as I can tell)
• Suitable for use with mobile and desktop clients
• All the typical features people are used to from social media (likes/reactions, tagging users, reply notifications, easy embedding of media)
• Live updates and notifications are part of the core
• Import scripts for many common other forums

(Minor)

• “Tracking” as a state between “normal” and “watching” (it’s probably my favourite smaller feature of Discourse)
• Posts can be written in markdown (might just be me, but I really enjoy being able to format posts without all those BBCode brackets)
• Persistent drafts for new posts
• Container-based deployment is possible
• SEO-friendly URLs for posts
• Data explorer! (again, probably mostly me, but it’s really a lot simpler to use the Data Explorer with its reference to columns in the common tables than to dig through a database directly)

With that being said, there is a number of points for improvement:

(Major)

• The UI/UX, especially of the main page - this has been mentioned already, but I there is almost a “baroque abundance” to the UI of Discourse, with so many things being accessible through at least two navigation paths (the side menu is probably the worst offender; it is not the only one, though), while at the same time other options are missing (e.g. I don’t think I have found an option to look at the list of topics I am tracking or watching when there are no new replies; but maybe I just haven’t found it) and the metaphors for different screen areas are not really clear/some functions are not available at the places where I would intuitively expect them. I will try to spin up a dedicated post for this in the coming weeks, since I feel this warrants a discussion of specific details.
• A similar thing could be said about features - and personally I agree with @piffy that the use case for public chat on a forum that also has private messages with live notifications isn’t really clear. However, I’m willing to accept that maybe I am simply not the target audience for this.
• Discourse doesn’t make it exactly easy to structure content, especially when coming from a classical forum with a multi-level category hierarchy (for the community we are planning to migrate, we regularly have three levels of nesting). Most of the software seems to suggest that content should ideally be structured into a small number of categories and that the rest should be handled with tags (and I think for communities in which this works, there’s really no issue). Now sub-categories do exist, but since they neither show up in the side menu nor in the category list, it feels like they are more tolerated than embraced throughout the software. At the same time, category groups are not of the core, and a clean, visually appealing look like that of the Blizzard Diablo forums seems to require heavy customization. This is the point where I saw people bounce off Discourse hardest.
• The lack of polished, clean first-party themes is making it much harder to get started quickly. Personally, I find the category page to be the most problematic since it will, by default, look like someone accidentally dropped a color palette on it, and I don’t have a good idea yet on how to work around this (because different category colors are still quite useful in the latest list)

(Minor)

• For a software that handles pretty large communities, the moderation tools in Discourse are surprisingly bare-bones. I would have expected the ability to easily start a discussion on reports within the moderation team in more complex cases. Similarly, I would have expected a warning point/warning level system by default. This technically could even be classified as major, but I don’t want to rule out that I simply haven’t found the right options yet.
• The lack of branding that extends to not even having a footer means that it took me a bit until I started realizing that Discourse was already used in a number of larger communities. Now I don’t think the lack of obvious branding is a bad thing per se, but potentially the use of Discourse could be indicated in a comment of the rendered HTML, so it would be available to anyone looking at the source code in the browser. That way brand awareness could be increased a bit.
• I tend to say that Discourse is overdoing it a bit in terms of gamification/mechanics of user activation. Getting “achievements” for even the most basic functions feels quite weird to me. Similarly, as expressed in the respective thread, I’m not the biggest fan of messages like “we haven’t seen X in a while”, “Y is new here”. I know new user tips can be deactivated, but I think it’s more a question of having a way to just tone it down a bit instead of completely removing them (an option to turn off the user messages on a preference basis would still be great, though).

Edit:
Forgot about moderation tools in the first iteration and added a bullet point for them later on.

[png (Portable Network Graphics)]

Well, back from my yearly unexpected and unannounced hiatus, so might as well give my 2¢ since I already got a password reset because I completely forgot my password. And sorry if some things are a bit wrong, really tired right now and don’t feel like doing my research.

Certain platforms are better for certain needs. Most people want to get some features out-of-the-box and not have to spend time setting multiple things up for their needs. Sometimes creators want more of a social media platform, sometimes they want other things that are minimalistic and simple, and sometimes people see the $100 price tag and get steered off because they don’t really know it’s open-sourced and they can host it themselves for even more than 50% cheaper, or maybe it’s just they don’t want to be a sysadmin. Maybe there are some features that they prefer, maybe they just enjoy an instant-message-like experience. There’s just multiple aspects to choosing a platform, and generally, first impressions are the selling points.

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

@oshyan

Notice that reference to the self-install via Github is not only much higher up the page, but also includes a direct link, whereas on the current site there is no link where it first mentions Open Source, and the word “install” is never used

Just a quick follow up here to show some small changes we recently made to bring some of this back into the fore:

On pricing, it’s now right below the other options:

On the home page, it’s shown on first explicit mention of our hosting:

And also right above the footer:

[oshyan (Oshyan Greene)]

Looks great, thank you!

[Grae]

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.

[denvergeeks]

@Grae I strongly encourage you to share this conversation here, publicly, so that we all can gain maximum learning from your experiences!

[oshyan (Oshyan Greene)]

I’m sad to hear your efforts did not pay off in the way you hoped, and that Discourse is still not a good fit for this type of need. That said it’s my sense that, at least previously, CDCK was not necessarily as interested in being a direct Circle competitor, particularly in terms of paid membership and being an educational platform.

So I think it’s important to ask: what are the open source / self-host / data ownership versions of Circle that are out there, if any? And I mean any one of those things, it doesn’t have to be all of them. I’m sure there are options I’m not aware of. I do still think Discourse could be one of those, and that it’s a large and potentially valuable market that they’re missing out on more than they should.

[Grae]

@oshyan

I’m sad to hear your efforts did not pay off in the way you hoped, and that Discourse is still not a good fit for this type of need. That said it’s my sense that, at least previously, CDCK was not necessarily as interested in being a direct Circle competitor, particularly in terms of paid membership and being an educational platform.

The unfortunate thing about our use case is that we don’t care about either of those features. We won’t be using the paid membership feature at all and likely won’t be using the courses feature. Our use case really is just about having an internal community platform where we coordinate community service projects, in-person classes, and craft/art projects. All in a way that needs to be accessible to a general audience.

It’s literally just the complexity and design. I’ve seen @codinghorror say in several places “It’s just CSS, you can update it.”

@codinghorror

@Stranik

Many users are accustomed to a social network, so no matter what is in front of them, a blog, a forum, they want the appearance of a social network.

Well right, so… use CSS to modify the appearance to taste?

Of course that’s technically correct, but it doesn’t take into account the resources needed to do that: access to technical skills, knowledge of the platform to be customized, and the many thousands of dollars worth of employee time to do it.

That hurdle eliminates Discourse from the consideration funnel for so many organizations. We’re just a medium sized nonprofit. We don’t have any devs on staff where we can waive away the cost of customizing a test. Even if we did we couldn’t justify the many thousands of dollars in opportunity cost to set up an apples-to-apples demo. Imagine having to pay Circle or Slack thousands of dollars to demo a $400 / month hosted product!

I suspect one of the reasons there’s no “simplified” Discourse instance that’s demoable is because it would take so much effort to set that up. That’s a bonkers amount of effort to expect from potential customers! But maybe it’s a reasonable amount of effort from the solution provider. At least, I hope that it is. Because we can’t afford $20k in payroll or contractor costs to set up Discourse, but I’d jump on the opportunity to pay for a hosted enterprise plan that was accessible to my community. That might be evident from me posting about this stuff at 9pm on a Sunday.

[Grae]

@denvergeeks I’m happy to. I’m going to resist the urge to lengthen my wall of text, but if you have any questions about the organization, our experience setting up a demo, community member feedback on the demo, or our decision I’m happy to answer them.

[simon]

@Grae

Our use case really is just about having an internal community platform where we coordinate community service projects, in-person classes, and craft/art projects.

@Grae

I suspect one of the reasons there’s no “simplified” Discourse instance that’s demoable is because it would take so much effort to set that up.

I’ve been saying forever that Discourse can be used to solve a wide range of problems. That’s part of its strength, but it’s also overwhelming. Discourse (the business) should identify common use cases and develop templates for each of them.

With that in place, your research could have been reduced to signing up for a free trial on Discourse’s hosting and selecting the most appropriate “type of community” from a list of available community types that was shown on the Setup Wizard. If you didn’t find a template that matched your use case, and didn’t want to deal with a “give me all the bells and whistles” option, you’d have been able to quickly decide that Discourse wasn’t a good fit for your community.

It’s been a while since I signed up for a trial site, so if something close to what I’m suggesting has been implemented, just ignore this post.

[denvergeeks]

@simon

I’ve been saying forever that Discourse can be used to solve a wide range of problems. That’s part of its strength, but it’s also overwhelming. Discourse (the business) should identify common use cases and develop templates for each of them.

Purpose-specific “Templates” or Pre-Packaged “Distributions” each with its own default theme and set of plugins and theme components and pre-configured settings. Yes, absolutely. I would so enjoy participating and contributing in such a concerted effort.

[bloomexperiment (Tracey)]

I totally get your uphill battle there with trying to recommend Discourse and others not taking it up due to various reasons like friction (especially if other centralized hosted services are more readily available in their eyes). I’ve recommended it but sometimes people end up usually using something else, like Discord instead for example, even though it’s not fit for purpose (like for education during pandemic).

@Grae

Our use case really is just about having an internal community platform where we coordinate community service projects, in-person classes, and craft/art projects. All in a way that needs to be accessible to a general audience.

@Grae

It’s literally just the complexity and design.

I’m wondering what specific hurdles did you come across in Discourse that you’re referring to when you say the complexity here, so others can get a clearer picture. Like what did you run into, that is too complex to mess around with and customise?

Like for various examples:

• Is it the fact that Circle and other social media sites have a single stream, where people can post single posts and others can make short replies to each post? (I also use a custom made mental health service here with the same idea)

• Is it the topic list looking too overwhelming? Is it making topics?

Which parts are you finding that either you have no idea how to set up but wanted to customise if possible (but as you said, the work was too much) or that people had trouble with?

For reference, I’m referring to what you wanted to customise in here:

@Grae

Of course that’s technically correct, but it doesn’t take into account the resources needed to do that: access to technical skills, knowledge of the platform to be customized, and the many thousands of dollars worth of employee time to do it.

That hurdle eliminates Discourse from the consideration funnel for so many organizations. We’re just a medium sized nonprofit. We don’t have any devs on staff where we can waive away the cost of customizing a test. Even if we did we couldn’t justify the many thousands of dollars in opportunity cost to set up an apples-to-apples demo. Imagine having to pay Circle or Slack thousands of dollars to demo a $400 / month hosted product!

[bloomexperiment (Tracey)]

@Grae

Our use case really is just about having an internal community platform where we coordinate community service projects, in-person classes, and craft/art projects. All in a way that needs to be accessible to a general audience.

@simon

I’ve been saying forever that Discourse can be used to solve a wide range of problems. That’s part of its strength, but it’s also overwhelming. Discourse (the business) should identify common use cases and develop templates for each of them.

With that in place, your research could have been reduced to signing up for a free trial on Discourse’s hosting and selecting the most appropriate “type of community” from a list of available community types that was shown on the Setup Wizard.

@denvergeeks

Purpose-specific “Templates” or Pre-Packaged “Distributions” each with its own default theme and set of plugins and theme components and pre-configured settings. Yes, absolutely. I would so enjoy participating and contributing in such a concerted effort.

It sounds to me that perhaps Groups on Discourse could be one of the features that is more easily surfaced through the Setup Wizard.

For example, the admin can be asked:

What groups would you like to create?

And after entering a list of names, associated categories will be created which are just visible to people in those groups.

And when people sign up for an account, they can also be asked if they would like to join certain groups, if they’re publicly available. Or they can request to join groups, if the groups are available for requests to join.

I can start a new topic in feature for this one.

[simon]

@bloomexperiment

It sounds to me that perhaps Groups on Discourse could be one of the features that is more easily surfaced through the Setup Wizard.

Yes, how to configure groups for a given purpose is the cause of a lot of confusion. The Setup Wizard could walk site owners through the process.

I’m imagining something like this:

• the Wizard asks “What’s your community going to be used for?”
• a selection of available templates is displayed
• the site owner selects “customer support”
• the Wizard walks the site owner through the process of configuring a “support” group: the group’s name, incoming email address, category, etc

Another site owner selects “paid subscriptions” from the Setup Wizard:

• the Wizard walks them through the process of creating “subscribers” groups and categories
• gives them the option of configuring the Patreon and Subscriptions plugins to limit access to the “subcribers” categories

Another site owner selects “teamwork” from the Setup Wizard…

There should be an “all the bells and whistles” option, but new site owners shouldn’t be forced to make sense of “all the bells and whistles” by default.

If a “configuration templates” approach was used, individual templates could be added in a similar way to how automations can be added to the Automation plugin.

It’s the time of year when we file our taxes in Canada. I’ve been using the (unironically) awesome TurboTax application. It’s an example of how HTML forms can be used to clarify an otherwise confusing process. The Setup Wizard could do something similar.

[jimkleiber]

@Grae

All in a way that needs to be accessible to a general audience.

This is one of the main reasons I hesitate to invite people to Discourse. I’m not sure if I’m underestimating people’s abilities to learn how to navigate the UI or projecting my own troubles with it.

I’ve used Discourse for, gosh, almost 8 years now, and I still struggle to navigate the UI and I know much more about computers than I’d say 95% of the people who would join my forums.

I think why Circle may look so familiar and easier to navigate is for a few reasons:

It has branching conversations (Similar to FB, reddit, YouTube comments, and more)

These conversations branch and people can almost do a tree-search (me stretching my dev knowledge) to choose which branch they want to go down without reading everything.

Discourse has linear conversations, which require one to read the whole conversation, similar to forums, email groups/chains, and more.

I imagine many more people engage in branching conversations than linear ones online.

The settings menus are more familiar

Circle seems to be similar to Facebook or Twitter or any of those social networks in terms of finding one’s account and editing it.

I think Discourse’s settings dropdown header menu has an unfamiliar layout, with so many different types of notifications and a vertical icon list of links. I’m not saying one is necessarily better, but each time I look at the Discourse one, I think I feel confused and have to mentally parse it, and again, I’ve been using Discourse for a long time.

The text editor is more familiar

Most platforms seem to have simple text editors, basically just a box where people enter plain text or have icons to bold it or do other things.

Discourse has a lot of options, and maybe the bold/italics/etc buttons are similar, but the preview option is quite different than most. Even as I type this, I still have to remember to edit on the left-hand side, as the right-hand side is an uneditable preview. That doesn’t even take into consideration how I assume, again, at least 95% of my users won’t know markdown.

Those were just some examples

I’m not writing this to complain so much as to just point out a few things about why even I’ve thought that using Circle or Geneva or Discord or something with a similar UI would be easier to get people on board and keep them there. Maybe it’s just that I haven’t had a lot of experience with forums or email groups and that the Discourse layout is similar to that.

I think overall, the layout just seems really foreign to me and I imagine it might to others as well, and might require much more of a learning curve than other social-media-like platforms, in terms of the communication format, yes, but also just more standard things like settings dropdowns and such.

But I’m really curious to hear what you all think about this.

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

@jimkleiber

These conversations branch and people can almost do a tree-search (me stretching my dev knowledge) to choose which branch they want to go down without reading everything.

In my experience on Facebook if there are ever enough comments for something to be worth reading (like 10 or more), it takes about 4 clicks per message to be able to read them. I almost always give up. It is hard for me to believe that anyone reads any comments on Facebook (which can’t be true, since people apparently leave them? Or maybe they too just leave a comment and don’t read anyone else’s). What could be easier than having all of the posts displayed?

I can see how lots of people are put off by the markdown composer/preview, but I sure love it.

[Jagster (Jakke Lehtonen)]

@jimkleiber

I imagine many more people engage in branching conversations than linear ones online

Like they do at Facebook, Instagram, TikTok… wait the minut, those are actually flat and linear. Sure, Facebook uses threads, but — I don’t know if this is again another cultural thing — I don’t know anyone who thinks it is a good solution, and most are disliking it very much.

Still — the very basic structure is flat.

Or am I minsunderstaning something now?

[jimkleiber]

Oh, I agree that branching/nested/hierarchical approach doesn’t work well for conversations beyond a few comments. I think Discourse does deep discussion much much better with its linear layout. I still wonder if there could be a way to create and show linked topics differently so that the Discourse branching that exists becomes more apparent that it does.

@pfaffman

I can see how lots of people are put off by the markdown composer/preview, but I sure love it.

I mean, I personally appreciate it a lot, especially on a computer. On a phone, I like it less.

Maybe that’s another aspect I didn’t mention, how I think some of these other platforms may seem even more familiar on a phone/small screen than Discourse does. I dunno.

[jimkleiber]

Just taking a quick look at FB, if someone types in the “Write a comment…” box, it will be flat. If they click the “reply” button, it will become nested, up until maybe 3 levels or so then it flattens out.

IG also has “Add a comment” or “Reply”, the former creates a flat comment and the latter creates a nested comment.

I think yes many of those are flat but probably disconnected comments. At least from what I’ve seen, if people want to connect their comment to a previous one, they tend to click reply and nest it.

Discourse has reply at the bottom or reply after an individual post. The reply at the bottom is like the “Write a comment” box but I think it’s supposed to stay on topic with the original idea, merging into the flow of the conversation, and the Discourse reply under a post like the FB “reply” button allows people to make a nested comment, but the comment shows up both as nested and at the bottom.

I think this is a more effective way to do longer, more in-depth conversations, and yet it seems to not be way most people normally converse online.