I don’t get the love for discourse. I’m not one of those “every webpage should work without JS” purists, but Discourse seems intent to reinvent basic web features with JS and has some performance issues and as a consequence of both often (maybe when hitting something not in cache?) takes ages to load during which time you get nothing but a poorly-styled loading throbber, you can’t even read the content as it loads in. Even official instances are incredibly slow at times. One topic on https://meta.discourse.org/ just took over 30 seconds to load for me. Discourse just feels somewhat overengineered.
Also anything that’s $50 a month doesn’t compete at the low end (which is where most OSS discussion hosting would exist) with Discord, which is free.
I wonder if there's anything wrong on your end. Clicked on your link, searched for a topic with lots of replies and the content loaded instantly. Then I proceeded to spam-click on topics and still everything loaded instantly...
I think it’s a server side cache thing. I was loading a specific old topic on that instance and it took very long to load, but once loaded in the first time refreshes were decently fast (even in private windows). I’ve observed the same behaviour on the Figma forums, which are also discourse.
Measure the initial load time, subsequent loads are indeed faster
And to test many replies you actually have to see them since they're not loaded on page load, only when you get to the bottom of that page, so just opening the top doesn't test anything re. lots of replies
It barely works without JS. Essentially everything other than basic text display is broken, including search, pagination, sorting, etc. that said, I am surprised it works at all given the aforementioned loading throbber before you can see a page.
$50/month for the basic hosted option. Self-hosting requires skills and resources not available to everyone. It's very easy (and free) to start on Discord. Then if it takes off, there is too much friction to move to Discourse.
We banned all type assertions long time ago, and switched to type guards. I highly recommend this approach.
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