As far as I am concerned, the fewer accounts needed the better. You can't keep batting people to a different forum because they happen to have raised a point in the "wrong place". Look how well that worked with trying to get people not to post feature requests as GitHub issues.
Personally I feel that keeping Discourse (self-hosted or otherwise) would be better as there is an awful lot of information contained here.
Otherwise consolidating everything under GitHub sounds interesting.
"One login to bring them all and in the darkness bind them"
Yes although it's a bit off topic I think the ideal workflow would be to have one forum only and make the GitHub issues readonly. Then there would be some easy way for moderators to transfer bug reports from here to GitHub.
I'm saying this because somehow the high quality bug reports are often on the forum, while people post random stuff on the GitHub bug tracker (probably 90% is non-actionable). So with readonly issues and easily transferable Discourse bug reports we'd have the best of both worlds.
I agree the fewer accounts needed the better, but I don't prioritize that over making it easy to find the signal in the noise. Discourse has a bunch of noise. It's mostly noise.
GitHub has nearly everything in one place anyway (issues and discussions). It's only missing a Q&A portion, where comments are sorted by voting not chronologically (a feature that Discourse is completely missing).
+1 for Hetzner -- it's an amazing webhost and traffic probably wouldn't even be an issue there. A Hetzner cloud instance with one of their volumes would be great -- has support for Infrastructure-as-code (via terraform, pulumi), so write that once and you're good (you can make it open source if you want and others could help, since all the credential stuff is private obviously).
$300/month is a BEEFY instance that you will mostly waste -- a smaller instance that you can possibly scale horizontally (if you really need it, 99% of the time you won't, just add more bandwidth as you need extra).
Should be mostly set & forget though initial setup might take some time, it's even faster if you use discourse's official docker image -- then the steps are:
provision a cloud instance w/ a nice big volume
do basic hardening (ufw, fail2ban)
install docker
install caddy (could be a docker container)
point caddy at docker container running discourse (caddy will handle your HTTPS cert retrieval)
take backups and send them to a Hetzner storagebox w/ a cron job
I think Reddit (and similar platforms) are horrible for general forums like this one. Due to the way it works, it invites a different type of discussion.
I haven't tried the GitHub discussion thingy yet, but in my mind, GitHub is for the technical bits, not a place for "normal" people to have a general discussion
I like Discourse whenever I run into a project using it. I wasn't aware of the hosted version and its limit, but luckily you can at least self-host it!
Personally, I'm more partial to keeping things under your own control, but that's just me, and I don't have to provide a stable forum for such a large group of people.
I really hope we don't end up on Reddit. Over the years, they are pushing way too hard to force their apps and accounts on you. Seriously, have you tried just browsing the thing? Especially via a mobile browser?
Endless popups, app prompts, content loaded a few posts at a time... sometimes, they just cut you off after a certain point on mobile and tell you to use the app.
This, and any other walled-garden services, are the worst-case scenario imo.
Discord is not much better, and it just sucks as a knowledge base. Searching for answers in the past on there is just bad.
On the other hand, there's a lot to love about this forum: not only is it open enough (with the export) and works as a knowledge base (search! topics!), I think over the years we got ourselves a nice, friendly community. It's not just hyper-nerd techies; but "normal" folks, too! I'm not saying this can't be maintained on other platforms, but I'd really hate to risk losing this community.
I can, like, increase my monthly donation by a dollar if it helps.
This is something I was meaning to mention as well, and I don't think it's off topic. Discourse was designed to create healthy communities. When I look at other software communities, I find this one here to be the most friendly and the most helpful. Not 100% because of Discourse, of course. Lots of credit goes to the leaders and active members.
One additional problem with Reddit: the platform is literally designed to promote groupthink. Every bit of content is voted on to be promoted or suppressed, encouraging only conformist thinking. That's not good for a FOSS project.
@ laurent Does Discourse have any drill-down stats to see what User-Agents, or types of traffic is generating all the pageviews? e.g. I wonder how much of it might be bots, monitoring, scrapers, etc. that might be artificially inflating the number.
Discourse is a great platform for this use-case, and it'd be a shame to lose its benefits due to this.
I'm also wondering if they offer any sort of caching or CDN to put in front of the forum? e.g. maybe a chunk of these "billable" pageviews could be off-loaded to a CDN service.
although I'm not sure what to make of it. Otherwise we generally have no control over the infrastructure, what gets cached, etc. since this is managed hosting. I assume that indeed a good part of the forum could simply be cached and served as static pages, and I'd expect they are already doing something like this.
It makes complete sense that different tools will be better suited to different problems. Just like there are (at least) four types of documentation depending on the audience, there are different platforms best suited to different problems like usage questions, bug reports, feature design, and announcements. Expecting one forum to serve all of these audiences equally well is naive.
@zblesk has no problem making an account on Discourse, but Reddit is a bridge too far? "content loaded a few posts at a time" -- have you seen Discourse? Literally the same problem. I think this really demonstrates the rose-colored glasses some people are wearing.
Many commenters are swooning over Discourse as "not like the other girls" because it is fresh and new. Redditors have had the same sentiments about Reddit for years. I can find the same comments being made on Reddit today. "I love our little community in our secret corner of the internet." Every fresh, small community loves their fresh, small community while its still fresh and small, then becomes disillusioned as it grows. It has nothing to do with the technology, and everything to do with community size and novelty.
I can appreciate the irony of telling me "Reddit is literally designed for groupthink, encouraging only conformist thinking" when I'm the only non-conformist in this thread endorsing Reddit. Voting is a good way of separating signal from noise at scale (see The Wisdom of Crowds). It is the reason Stack Overflow and Reddit became so successful.
I'm not saying this can't be maintained on other platforms, but I'd really hate to risk losing this community.
Well said!