An old-school forum might seem like kind of a weird choice for a community where real-time communication has been so central. One benefit of a platform like Discourse is the searchability of previous conversations. And since we’re also in the data business, that becomes more and more valuable as time goes on.
There’s also something really…calming about a slower cadence of messages, don’t you think? This doesn’t preclude the use of Signal for real-time comms, but for most topics, something like this might be more appropriate.
This also represents the beginning of our emergence from silent running. At some point, the maximal privacy position we’ve maintained has to give way to functionality and accessibility for a wider community.
This might not be where we land, but in all my testing of options for community platforms, Discourse had the most positive indicators and management tools. I’d like to give it a proper shakedown.