Oddbean new post about login | logout Dan Luu's insistence that Discourse doesn't constitute a real, moneyed, solid attempt at making a modern forum because it's slow and preachy and irritating seems wrong to me too, mind you: I mean, he's not wrong that it's slow and preachy and irritating but it's absolutely the Modern Forum Contender par excellence despite those things
it's not like PHPBB was running on rocket fuel
It's not Discourse being slow and preachy and irritating that killed the forum, it's modern interconnected mega-sites like Reddit and Twitter and, now, Mastodon, I think. I can go from zero to having an opinion on r/Pathfinder2E in like 20 seconds, and if I want a place to shoot the shit I have one right here
I run a little Discourse silo for my friends and it handles that great, after a fair bit of tweaking to get it to stop being so damn parochial about what we're allowed to post. I'd say that being slow, preachy, and irritating are absolutely not the right problems to be solving with Discourse in the first place. What I think it might actually need is something more akin to federation...
@6b1b8e04 Just looked at the pricing for this... 'thing'. $50 a /month/ for 100 'members' and a whole /10gb/ of storage!? It even has 'secure web access' as a 'feature', not to mention 50k 'page views'... It didn't cost $50 a month nearly 10-12 years ago to run a fully featured forum for thousands with multiple times the storage and a whole hell of a lot more 'page views' as well as real time chat, events and calendars, etc, what even is this?
@e418e2c7 tbch their full service hosted pricing subsidizes the development of their free client, you can run a Discourse application for 1000 members on a $10/mo Hetzner box ez