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Discussion on: Slack for online communities. Cant we do better? What about err.. Forums?

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ahferroin7 profile image
Austin S. Hemmelgarn

The problem is the overhead of setting up and maintaining a forum. It takes less than 5 minutes to start up a Discord 'server' or a new Slack and requires zero experience, compared to taking at least 5 minutes to set up a new Discourse instance and requiring a non-negligible amount of experience to do it right.

Personally, as much as I hate certain things about Discord (see for example horrendous mobile app (no, seriously, Slack's is way better on multiple levels)), I actually do find it to be reasonable for what most online communities actually want (in essence, something akin to IRC, just with a fancy UI).

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brpaz profile image
Bruno Paz • Edited

Yeah, I agree about the setup and maintenance. That´s why I think that we are missing a "Forum as a service" platform, that would do that for you.

About the last part, I think it really depends on the goals of the community. a chat based approach can be nice just to shoot some quick questions but for more detailed and organized discussions it's not the best.

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ahferroin7 profile image
Austin S. Hemmelgarn

Yeah, I agree about the setup and maintenance. That´s why I think that we are missing a "Forum as a service" platform, that would do that for you.

Agreed, though right now it would even be a step up if VPS providers that already offer one-click application deployment offered any forum stacks for that.

About the last part, I think it really depends on the goals of the community. a chat based approach can be nice just to shoot some quick questions but for more detailed and organized discussions it's not the best.

Agreed to a certain extent. The only times I've personally found Discord to be inadequate for a detailed and organized discussion were cases when discussing things properly required people posting hundreds of lines of text at a time. If it's something that doesn't require a knowledge dump, I find Discord to be easier to work with because of the inherently real-time nature (which makes it easy to do things like running a meeting as-per Robert's Rules of Order).