It’s been a year now since the forum went public. We already did some evaluation, this is the last time I’ll bump this topic to collect some more feedback to work with.
But I’ve got some good news. I’ll continue to support the forum for an undefined period. In other words, last time I defined a minimum of 1 year dedication to give the forum a fair chance. I won’t rehash it to another period. This year has provided enough insight to how valuable this forum can be. The analytics of Plausible convinced me even more. We have way more visitors than the dashboard of Discourse itself shows. Which makes sense, because the data of Discourse is only about logged in users. It’s still sad to see many people don’t sign up, and those who do, don’t really post or interact much.
I personally still think the forum is the best platform to support and grow our movement. Of course the forum can be used in combination with other solutions. Such as social-media to build up an audience and group chat to discuss short term plans in the moment. But what we need as well is a persistent knowledge base we can contribute to as a community and develop projects and goals, that’s where the forum comes in. Below are some of the main reasons I think the forum excels, there are more reasons, but I value these the most:
- True community decisions which are accessible to everyone, no matter your timezone or busy schedule. Which are also persistent and categorized so that they are easy to find in the future and by search engines.
- Integrated mailing list functionality to automatically inform everyone of popular topics when people don’t visit the forum (which can be customized by users).
- Moderation by the community (not just a few appointed mods) and assisted by true AI that can detect toxic language. This makes moderation much more time efficient than in a group chat or even the big social-media platforms.
- The forum acts as a knowledge base and can also work with #wiki topics, this way documentation can be kept up to date and we as a community own and control it. No small group that has this responsibility, we all have.
- We own the data, which greatly improves privacy and control.
- Runs on open-source software and uses renewable power.
- Many, many more! See e.g. the docs.