Anyone aware of a user community product that has the simplicity of chat threads without the complexity of Discord/Slack? We’re trying to build a space where people can give feedback and meet other users but most in our audience don’t already use Discord (and wouldn’t find a ton of value in it to make it worth the download).
Zulip is stellar. I'd kind of forgotten about it, but I went on Bytecode Alliance's Zulip recently it was so much better having threads and conversation interleaved together like they do. I was quickly able to assess the last couple months, and subscribe to a couple async ongoing threads. Rarely have I experienced a chat system so able to be async.
To me an old fashioned forum would be something like phpBB. Discourse-style forums are relatively new and IMHO much worse in terms of UI. I really don't get the appeal.
I grew up in the phpbb/vBulletin era, and even back then it was a common complaint when Discourse first came out. Never quite understood the hate myself, but I'd love to hear your thoughts?
To give a concrete example of what others are saying and why I also really do not like discourse, the performance issues in combination with other bugs and limitations makes it extremely clunky for large threads. Go to something like [0] and try searching for a piece of text. In both Firefox and chrome, the discourse search box totally breaks for me: I can navigate to the first result, but after that future attempts to bring the search box up fail unless I go back to the original link and search again (ie remove the comment id suffix from url). The native browser search of course is not sufficient because 90% of the thread is not loaded, and the lack of proper pagination makes it hard to search with external engines. After a few months of frustration I finally learned about the hidden /print endpoint to dump the thread into a single page which helps, but still does not give me warm fuzzies about discourse.
I already prefer native browser search and proper pagination instead of loading the page on-demand, but if none of these bugs existed, I could at least tolerate the decisions. Given the bugs though, these design choices really grind my gears in a special way.
Discourse is written in ruby, and it's not as performant as I would like. Discourse isn't really suitable for running on, say, a Raspberry Pi 5. It's even somewhat sluggish-feeling at times, running on a 4ish year old PC as a server (which my own org does, in a Docker container in Debian). We have a low user count, so that sluggishness seems unreasonable.
Frankly, I don't like almost anything about it. The dynamic loading/endless scrolling instead of pages, the silly navigation bar, the "x time later" instead of the exact date and time, the narrow post width...
I get "dumbed-down, mobile first" vibes from the UI, kinda like Twitter, which is the last thing I want for a forum with thoughtful discussions. And it's also more bloated/slower than classic forums (https://danluu.com/slow-device/).
I think the best forum software right now is XenForo. But even phpBB and many similar free alternatives (MyBB, SMF,...) are better than Discourse. Those can also be heavily customized (might be true for Discourse too, but I doubt it would improve it much).
I see. Thank you for sharing! I'm not affiliated with the forum software, but I do manage a discourse instance at work and was just curious about your UX thoughts.
I appreciate the details!
I don't like infinite scrolling either, and I agree that there's a lot of wasted space in the default layout.
If most of your audience doesn't use Discord, you're in a good spot. In the web dev world, so many projects use Discord that it's a massive benefit to just be in the server list with them. I felt my project had to use Discord.
It's been a while since I investigated solutions, but I really wanted Matrix to be viable at the time. I would check out https://element.io/ and see if it works for you.
I'm the founder and we're building a customer community platform exactly for the use case you describe.
Our focus is on a simple and intuitive user experience that is familiar to non-technical end-users. We've also tried to make it as frictionless for them to sign up and start contributing (nothing to download, passwordless sign up and login). You also maintain full control and data ownership of your users (unless Discord).
Keen to hear any feedback, and why / why not if what we've built would work for you?
I've been keeping my eye out for something more responsive (in an AJAX-like way) than phpBB, but less bloated than Discourse (as it's written in ruby). Something Open Source, decently low-effort to maintain (I like Debian), could run on a Raspberry Pi 5 for a small community, and doesn't require docker. This might be suitable. Thanks for the endorsement.
I'd also say Matrix, as this is where the most communities are today that are not on propietary platforms.
Although the UX is not that great, when logging in via a new device, as it takes long to do the first sync (the new syncv3 protocol is supposed to fix this but it's still in beta)
most new users keep losing identity because they have no idea they are using vector.im as their "nicksrv" of sorts and that their recovery code and password are not their session key. it's a disaster.
I honestly don’t get chat for communities (and I spent a lot of time in IRC). Without starch and structure, knowledge is constantly being lost and there is no way for newcomers to quickly get up to speed if they happen to be a timezone or two away from the “core” community. Forums and Discourse are so much better that I have to ask why it isn’t obvious.
The Todoist folks also make Twist, which is in this family and looks simple and pretty nice. Not sure why it has so little uptake. https://twist.com/home
Just one correction that Discord does not have to be downloaded as it works in the browser also. And you don't even need to provide an email address at first. As such, the barrier of entry is quite low.
I refuse Discord after eventually having every account get blocked pending phone-number verification. In my country that's effectively KYC (impossible to get a SIM card without govt ID).
Depending on IP and usage, this may happen at any point between registration and several years later.
when I was building finclout, I thought it makes more sense to organize conversations horizontally and vertically instead of the current UI paradigm where everything is vertically scrolling.
TBH I consider that a feature, to guard against spam and trolls.
My ideal project forum is one where anyone on the internet can read the forum, but contributing to the forum requires some bare minimum effort of creating and verifying a new account. Both of those are the opposite of what Discord does.
I frankly don't mourn the loss of users "who can't be bothered with yet another account". Putting thought and effort into forum interactions takes longer than creating an account, so someone incapable of the latter is usually incapable of the former.
Have you ever managed one? I have, and it's a regular occurrence. Though not necessarily something that ends up being visible to every user (unless you happen to be around precisely when it happens, before we delete the content).
IMO Discord is a non-starter for many tech people due to privacy issues and frequent/random phone number requirements. I and many others are completely unable to use it even if we wanted to, because immediately after logging in you get hit with a phone wall. Not everyone gets this but it indeed happens to a wide enough array of people to be quite problematic IMO.
https://zulip.com/