Discourse

Every once in a while I get a bee in my bonnet about setting up a Discourse community without remembering that the software is the world’s most effective ghost town generator.

The internet needs a modern forum software, I think. It’s good that this exists: and I’ve been running a tiny, private Discourse community for lo, near a decade now. So, actually, I’m kind of on the side of Discourse.

Like, my Discourse site doesn’t have a CDN set up. Because the CDN that I use, Cloudflare, one of the most common CDN platforms on the internet, isn’t supported by Discourse. That’s fine: I only have about 30 users, all of us in the Pacific Northwest, serving the whole site out of Wasabi object storage in Oregon is perfectly fine. but Discourse feels the need to pop up a notification every single week letting me know that this is a critical error that I need to fix! Let me live my life, Discourse.

I’m still weirded out by some of the ways they brand themselves and act. Discourse. A civilized discussion platform. Who decided that their marketing should be dripping with, like, neo-colonial derision for the way that people communicate online? That’s really baked in from the get-go, too, all the way down to the name of the platform itself. “Discourse”.

🧐 Mmm, yes. Fetch me my tea, Willinglsley, it’s time for a civilized discussion.

This isn’t a place for your memes and nonsense, this is a Serious Roman Forum for high-minded communique.

I can’t think of a software package where I’ve had to disable more dubiously helpful “leave it to us, we know how to run a community better than you do” features than Discourse. “That’s not enough words, you can’t post a response that’s just an emoji.” “Oh, you need to read everything and rank up on the forum levels before you participate, you neophyte.”

obviously the problem with internet communication has always been that it’s Not Polite And Erudite Enough

why, if we could all simply have a vigorous discussion with a polite exchange of ideas and then shake hands afterwards, what a pleasant place the internet could have become, but INSTEAD you’re ignoring our civilized offerings and pelting one another with TWITCH EMOTES like a bunch of sava—

It is simultaneously the best or second-best available FOSS community communication product (in competition with Mastodon, even though they serve different purposes) and just awkward and frustrating and disappointing in so many little ways.