For now we're on the free open source plan, but to continue being hosted by Discourse it would cost $300 per month and that seems to me like a lot of money just for a forum. Even with that, we'll be at 300k/500k, which means another upgrade might be needed in a year or two.
So I'm wondering what's the best course of action here. Perhaps the forum could be moved elsewhere? Are there any other Discourse providers that charge less or maybe even have free plans for open source projects? Self-hosting I guess would be an option too, but with that traffic I'm not sure we'd save any money. Or maybe just close the forum and move to Reddit or other free online community. Any suggestion would be welcome.
I think Reddit for general discussions, announcements and questions is ideal there's already a small community on reddit.
Discord I think would make sense for more technical discussions but might be more hassle to setup and manage.
Personally I just enjoy hopping on this forum stalking discussions and watchung things that people are creating with/for Joplin and keeping up with the ongoing development. I truly appreciate the work you do and the active helpful community here.
Otherwise not sure if a donation like model that is used by filefreesync would make sense. Which basicalky lets you usenthe software and get updates for a certain amount of time which is linked to your donation. So if let's say I donated £4 it would give me 4 months of automatic software updates if that time passes I can still use the software but to update to new software I would have to donate again. Something like that is fair pricing for me cause I do not have to update every single time but if thereis something exciting in a particular version I would donate to get that update. now I understand that it might not be super-practical with hoe actively Joplin is developed and the fact that it is still maturing. But just my two cents from someone who appreciates good software and who is sick of seen ing crap-ware on iPad which charges a lot of money in monthly subscriptions for inferior software and stale development.
I'm sorry I don't have any good suggestions. I'd prefer to continue to have the Discourse forum, but keeping it on the current platform clearly isn't feasible. I don't see Reddit as a good alternative even for announcements.
To get some feeling for the hardware requirements, I did some research on the discourse meta:
Here is another one
So even for big forums, the hardware requirements are not too bad, I think so I assume that self hosting (in the sense of the server software, not necessarily the hardware) will be much cheaper.
For example, on Hetzner (no affiliation!) for around 100 €/month you get a dedicated root server with
I really like private forums for this purpose, and Discourse in particular. I don't much enjoy Reddit - partly for the interface and partly for the style of interaction it attracts.
I wish we could stay with Discourse. If self-hosting is an option (and it seems there are root servers out there that have unlimited plans), I'm all for it. More than happy to help with admin stuff.
Thanks for the support, doing maintenance on a self hosted instance is actually one of my worry but if there can be three of us with access it might make sense. Not too sure what kind of VPS would be needed for us though. I've read a bit the posts that @franzperdido mentioned and I think we are in the case where a major part of the read views is on a cached content, basically people finding posts via search engines to solve various problems, and those rarely change.
That's great they have this now especially if it's free. In our case the issue obviously is that we probably can't import the existing forum content, and I'm thinking we should try to preserve this if possible.
Have you got in touch with Discourse directly about the potential for any discounts? They're likely to offer them (As far as financially constrained open source high profile projects go at least)
For now they haven't contacted me, but if they do I'll indeed ask for a discount. In the meantime I prefer not to contact them and see if we can keep on going on the free plan. Perhaps they'll just tolerate it since indeed it's an open source project, but that may be wishful thinking.
is there an option on reddit to write even with posts older then a few months? otherwise I also think it is pretty suboptimal for a program with feature requests, updates, addons etc.
