Discouragement of the First-Time Discourse Admin

stephtara
Mon, 15 Dec 2025 18:28:33 +0000
Community Building

I’m posting this as a separate topic from Structuring an active support community migrating from Facebook because it feels on another level: community building starts before anybody is there, when the community builder (let’s call her that) designs the way the community will function and implements that community design in her tool of choice: adjusting settings, adding or removing functionalities, picking a theme, creating categories, thinking about the member onboarding flow, how moderation will be enforced, etc.

These design decisions are the result of an interaction, one could say a “conversation”, between the vision of the community builder and the possibilities of the tool. “We shape our tools and they shape us”, quoting liberally.

Right now, this community builder is feeling very overwhelmed and discouraged. And I’d like to share some thoughts about that.

First, a little about me. I’m not a first-time community builder, or new to web-based tools. I’ve been in this space of “humans connecting online” for over 25 years, at times professionally, at times not. I’m not a developer, but I have enough technical knowledge that I have at times administered my own server and coded a few WordPress plugins, back in the days. I’ve designed and taught courses on blogging, social media and online communities before they were a “thing”. I’m no stranger to hunkering down with the user manual to troubleshoot whatever is not working correctly.

The main community I run nowadays is going to turn eight years old and is 8-9k members strong, over three facebook groups. It is completely non-web, non-technical. It’s for people with sick cats. And veterinarians. It is very active, very healthy, and (I’m not the one who says it) extremely well-managed and moderated. There is a team of 20-30 people involved in running it. The average community member struggles digitally as soon as they are taken out of their usual activities (chatting on Messenger, creating a facebook post, or making a comment). Getting them to fill in values in a Google Sheet, stay logged in there on their phone, and share the link to the Sheet in their posts is a challenge.

This is not to toot my horn, but to state clearly that I am what one could call a non-developer web power-user. Not some random person who is thinking of setting up a “forum” or a “community”.

And although I’m super enthusiastic about the possibilities I see with Discourse, I am drowning. I’ve spent countless hours searching, reading, and posting on Meta. I’ve looked at setting checkboxes until my eyes go square. I am familiar enough with the platform to have a feel for what should be possible, but I feel as if I’m in front of the contents of the boxes my IKEA sofa was delivered in, but without the instructions or the tools. The cognitive load of all the possibilities and options is killing me. The thought of my sweet, digitally-illiterate members being faced with the multitude of functionalities of Discourse’s default settings and appearance gives me cold sweats.

So what am I doing here? Why not leave things as they are, if my Facebook community is going so well? Because I have known from day one that Facebook would work only as long as its inevitable enshittification allowed (wasn’t in my vocabulary at the time, but I understood the process very clearly). For years, the balance was in Facebook’s favour. These last years, it has started to tip. Every now and again I would keep an eye open for alternatives, knowing that I could wake up one morning with the group gone. But no solution I saw seemed like a viable option to support this community.

This summer, Discourse arrived on my radar. I signed up for a trial and played around with it all I could for a week (my Facebook account suspension ate up the second week of the trial, but that’s another story). I was blown away. Here was a tool that would allow us to do everything we could only dream of on Facebook. It was powerful, endlessly configurable, modern and robust. And open-source: I could self-host it. Within a few days, I was sold. Our community’s new home would be called Discourse.

I haven’t changed my mind. I still see a future where Discourse checks all those boxes for us, and where our community thrives in its own home, free from the shackles of Big Platform. But getting there is a much more difficult road than I anticipated. I am really struggling. Yesterday one of my tech-savvier moderators hopped onto our Discourse install to come and lend me a hand, and her initial reaction was confusion with the interface and functionalities. If I needed confirmation that the default is far, far from what will work for us.

Last night, I stumbled upon this topic: Why isn't Discourse more frequently recommended as a "community platform"? – I read, read, and read some more. I could relate to a lot of the sentiment expressed in the conversation. @oshyan , in particular, makes many points that really hit home for me. I honestly consider that somebody with my background and skillset should not be having such a hard time getting Discourse into working shape for a community of “normal people”. I’ve installed and configured WordPress installations with umpteen plugins countless times without breaking a sweat – sure, WordPress is less complex, but it’s not just that: there is something about the “information architecture” of finding my way through what I need to do that makes it feel like a maze rather than a guided city tour.

Maybe I’m doing it wrong. But if I am, it is despite my best efforts to “do it right”. I am hugely appreciative of the existence of Discourse. Truly. And the responsiveness I’ve found on Meta is also heart-warming. I understand that when running a business or even “just” developing a tool, ressources are never sufficient to do everything that would need to be done and one wishes to do.

But it’s extremely frustrating, as an enthusiastic user, to feel that the interface of the tool is getting in the way rather than facilitating a crucial part of building and managing a community. And this is something that even the most helpful support community in the world (looking at you, Meta!) can’t “fix”, unfortunately.

As I see it, particularly after reading the long thread linked to above, it’s fine to have a ton of features and settings, to allow the (real) power users to have things their way if they want to. But what I see missing in Discourse is a pared-down out-of-the-box configuration that will work for the average community builder and the average non-techy community. Sometimes less is more.

When you install WordPress, you can start blogging right away as long as you have the technical skills to send an e-mail, and it will work for you, average person who has stuff to say, and your average readers who want to read you. You can tweak a few settings if you like, or go to town with plugins and themes if you’re an edge use-case or a power-user. My Mac has design choices baked in that mostly work for most people. If they don’t, it even has a command line and config files that courageous or technical users can play with.

I’m aware I’m probably not saying anything here that hasn’t been said before, and that “Discourse” is certainly aware of its shortcomings and plans to tackle them. But I’m tired and frustrated, and discouraged, and – not to take anything away of how nice and supportive people are here – I am feeling a bit alone with how difficult this all is: look, there are all these great guides, all this great information on Meta, all these settings and themes and components and plugins to solve my problems one way or another. But that does nothing to help solve the issue that exists at another level: finding my way through this unfamiliar jungle of possibilities so abundant that they refuse to find a stable place in my brain, and dealing with an interface which adds friction (not on purpose of course!) in places where I’d need it removed.

If you’ve read this far, thanks for listening. And I welcome your thoughts regarding my experience, whether you have been through or are going through similar trials, or think I am missing the point.

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