I like reddit and get a lot out of it as a community, but it's certainly not perfect (what is?). OTOH, I don't feel that it would be the right platform for the kind of discussion that I find here. In theory StackOverflow could be better, but I despise it and the "holier than thou" attitude of too many of the participants. If the forums moved there I'd ignore them and lose a lot from this community. But, I don't feel that the kinds of discussion Stackoverflow has is suitable for this environment either.
Discourse does what it says on the tin, and that's important. It supports free-flowing conversations in a way that a lot of other platforms do not. I understand that costs are important for Open Source projects with a small user base, and I don't really have enough experience in the discussion forums area to come up with a solution, sorry. I do hope that the quality of discussions isn't compromised by the eventual choice of platform.
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I think the discussion area in the Joplin github repository should be activated. There are a lot of ideas for new features or plugins discussion launched here on Discourse which I really think belong in the github discussion. I looked at the powershell repository on github which uses the discussion area and found that suggestions and ideas for features and the discussion around those should be close to the source of the app. Now, what is left for Discourse then? Support? maybe. General talk about working with Joplin? Maybe. I guess the experience between mobile and desktop devices will differ enough for some things to stay here. But in the end I think that opening up the discussion area on github is independent of what other tools the community uses.
Instant chat could be done on gitter.im and turns out to be a good feature in many other projects.
This is probably the best option if that day ever comes, take my name down as I'd be willing to assist.
We are already spread out too much. Discord, web, forum, github (and there are some unofficial channels).
I don't think it makes sense to open yet another place to discuss things.
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To add my two cents to the "Reddit?" subtopic here: For the style of most discussions going on in the Joplin community, I like the chronological post order here in discord much better than an upvote/downvote-based system (Reddit, StackOverflow, ...). I feel it better promotes two-way conversations, which often lead to interesting side topics. On the other hand, there's enough posts that ask a question and get an answer with the first couple of posts, so imho there's no danger of all threads being too long.
As a side note, a community-driven wiki-style knowledge base also sounds like a good idea (independent of the platform).
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In case you're new to Reddit, you can choose to sort comments in chronological order. Reddit also has threaded comments, which is an advantage over unthreaded forums like Discourse. Discourse interleaves every side conversation together, so you're either (a) mentally keeping track of 15 different side conversations as you read through the comments linearly or (b) jumping around from comment to comment in the same thread, only backwards, through the quote links.
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What does this even mean? I guess I'd understand if Joplin used Fossil or something; but it's just github. The issues are not really "close to the source" in any other way than that it's maybe fewer clicks to get them. That's not worth it. Even feature requests are supposed to be posted here on Discourse first, and with good reason: having things spread all over the place is annoying, because always the thing you're trying to find is in the one place you didn't think of searching.
If the number of pageviews is forcing Joplin away from Discourse, then GitHub is more than source code and issue tracking. The discussion area on GitHub was recently added to give developers the possibility to build communities.
This is a community built around an app stored on GitHub with plugins mostly stored on GitHub and I don't know how many of the components used within core Joplin is hosted on GitHub. If Joplin is forced to move to another platform for community things I think it is worth considering the features that GitHub offers.
And just like Joplin: It is as simple as using the search entry on GitHub to find what you are looking for.
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