I’ve gotten in the habit of explaining Discourse to people as a clubhouse. A place on the Internet that belongs exclusively to you and your friends — whether you have 10 friends or a few hundred thousand. There’s a big difference between a Facebook Group and having your own clubhouse. A Facebook Group is like…
This topic is for comments on the original blog entry at: http://blog.discourse.org/2013/05/your-online-clubhouse/
This could be related to the whole hackerspace movement. I love the whole idea of pitching up a “you-space”, even more so when there’s a goal involved. That’s also why I love discourse. 
It’s funny, today I was talking to a few friends about how guilds will work in a game we’re working on, and we considered giving every guild a forum as their kind of meeting ground, and the idea really played to this.
I raised the question about preserving communities on quora but it didn’t get any answers. Discourse may be the solution. However, if someone else is hosting it and they want to shut it down, can the community be sure that they can get at the content?
This is the problem I currently have. To use @codinghorror’s analogy…My current clubhouse is being guarded by a troll that will come and knock it down if I stop paying him.
I’m not sure if this is an answer to what you’re saying, but that could usually be solved by building your own servers. Apparently it’s not super expensive, and if you’re willing to have friends pitch in for a public space, pitching in for a server and some supplies should be cake! If someone can’t afford to host it themselves any more (for some reason), there are always places to go. (payed hosting, “the cloud” if you will, moving the server to a friend’s house)
Though I’d hope that most legit hosts (ones that cater to personal projects, anyway) would “freeze” your account, and allow you to reactivate it once you have paid up to date.
Another thing, and one that I hope the Discourse team considers when they move toward providing hosting solutions, is the case of someone who has started a discourse-powered forum using the paid hosting solutions, who later wants to move to self hosting. (for whatever reason) Hopefully, there will be a reasonably easy migration path to move to a new server.
I’ve been running off the back of a popular hosted forum, without mentioning the specific host…It’s also used by the likes of Netflix, Mozilla and Webtrends. All I can say is they must have a ton of VC cash to advertise everywhere as the actual framework behind it is terrible… It’s mostly window dressing. Anyway I digress…If I stop paying this host (USD 1,200 p.a.) they will flick the switch and dump my forum into the recycle bin, which is fine, that’s the deal!
Since finding Discourse, I’m ready to write off the collective wisdom in those several thousand posts and start again. It will be painful but I hate paying all that money for a sub-standard system, an army of customer support drones and glacial rates of change.