Misago VS Discourse

I would like to use this opportunity to also mention about a forum software I am building, Misago: https://misago-project.org/

Around year ago I've started to aggressively pursue improvements to it's UX and featureset which to my surprise resulted in project getting new (small) wave of attention and a lot of great feedback on what else is missing and what needs changed that I am working on at.

I've grown on old school forums, phpBB2, Invision Power Board 2.3, vBulletin 3 and I am trying to hit a sweet spot between old and new, taking inspiration from both other modern solutions like Discourse or Flarum, but also from latest versions of XenForo and Invision Community.

A shameless self promotion, but for last 10 years or so I've been developing and maintaining my own forum software, Misago:

https://misago-project.org/

It's build with Python and React, so obviously not so easy to setup like PHP solutions, but there's also a magic docker setup that you can just git clone to your server and get forum running in minutes.

But with Misago I am trying to find a sweet spot between "new wave" of forum software and old solutions. So there's plenty of interactivity in the UI that JS provides and there's markdown support, but there's also classic pagination instead of infinite scrolling.

Misago used to be nice. I see they haven't updated it in a while, though...

> Tell me another platform that is free, has realtime chat, voice and video, has stable service, allows sharing images and other media, with good ownership management... and is open source.

Mattermost: https://mattermost.com/

Rocket.Chat: https://www.rocket.chat/

Nextcloud Talk: https://nextcloud.com/talk/

Self hosting and some assembly required. I've run all of them on cheap VPSes to explore a Slack/Discord replacement, neither was mindblowing but all of them seemed okay (Nextcloud's offering was rather barebones, though).

Audio and video support varies because getting those right is challenging, at best you'd just integrate with something like Jitsi, that one's actually pretty good for meetings and such: https://jitsi.org/ and has a cloud version too: https://meet.jit.si/ (yet people still go for Zoom and it's odd UI/UX choices)

I actually rather liked forums back in the day, but I guess nobody will be setting up that many phpBB instances in the current year, though projects like Discourse also seem promising: https://www.discourse.org/

I don't think many people at all will be leaving Discord, due to how entrenched the platform is (network effect): if you want people to help you with what you're working on, you go where they are, not vice versa.

Discourse is also open source https://github.com/discourse/discourse

I disagree. Lots of communities, e.g. Julia or Stan, use https://www.discourse.org. Discourse is GPL2 and emulates old Internet forums.

Why isn't Discourse being listed here for forum software? It's open source and designed for modern communities. https://www.discourse.org/

Discourse is open source: https://github.com/discourse/discourse

You could hook it up to a mail provider and can host it yourself for less if you wanted.

I was reading mastodon.social's privacy policy, and noticed that the link at the bottom to Discourse's privacy policy links to Discourse's Github. I'm surprised because I thought it would be the privacy policy on discourse.org.

Yep. Any platform run by someone else can kick you off for any reason, and time.

You should consider looking into running discourse, which is a modernized forum software: https://github.com/discourse/discourse

Nice examples of what it looks like:

https://discourse.nixos.org/

https://forum.level1techs.com/

As a bonus, the content and community will be accessible to search engines, so it’s easy to find answers to problems that gave been already been addressed.

In general, consider combining the two, where discourse is the anchor of the community that can’t be yanked out from under you, while discord is the one that sells the data from your players in exchange for free voice and text chat.

It’s also possible to enable logging in with discord credentials https://meta.discourse.org/t/configure-discord-login-for-dis...

As well as pushing content from discord to discourse so it’s not hidden and losable: https://blog.discourse.org/2021/05/discord-and-discourse-bet...

So, I'm asking myself if you would be interested in joining a good old-fashioned forum (probably using discourse as software) in order to communicate with other gifted people around the globe. And please add any ideas you might have for a platform like this.