I am building an app that may, or may not, need a community hub. I see a lot of people using Discord. I don’t hate Discord, but I aint in love with it either. I was curious if anyone had thoughts on this. Thank you!
If you want to own your community space and make knowledge easily searchable, discourse is the move at $20/month.
Discord is great if you want a cheap space to use, but will probably get enshitified like reddit when it IPOs
https://alternativeto.net/news/2025/3/discord-is-bringing-video-ads-to-mobile-users-in-two-months/
If it’s a app, github discussions might be better
If you want a chat (using element a DM jitsi), email, and a website, it might be worth looking into hosting providers. If you want the full discord server boosts it is about $60/month (14 boosts * 4.99 $/boost),
Alternatively you can look into hosting providers such as digitalocean, vercel, OVH cloud, or linode to self host services
https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/how-to-install-the-element-chat-app/
You dont have to set up a community right now. Discord is popular and easy but it’s not the only choice. If you want quick, casual chats, Discord works. But if you want clear, organized discussions, a forum or another platform might be better. Its completely to start with basic feedback from users and create a bigger community later if people actually need it.
For a community based forum you want something vbulletin based, hands down.
It’s not even a competition.
I would look at Zenforo, and pretty much only Zenforo. Almost everything else is a bear by comparison
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