Discourse, anyone?

Posted Jun 16, 2025 21:10 UTC (Mon) by jjs (guest, #10315)
Parent article: Changes to Kubernetes Slack (Kubernetes Contributors blog)

Have they looked at Discourse (https://www.discourse.org/#). It's even available under GPL 2.0 license (https://www.discourse.org/about). I'm am member of some projects that use Discourse, the although certainly not at the scale of Kubernates. I don't know enough about Discourse to weigh their requirements listed against Discourse's scalability, but it is an open source option, if it does meet their requirements.

Discourse, anyone?

Posted Jun 16, 2025 21:18 UTC (Mon) by fraetor (subscriber, #161147) [Link] (4 responses)

I'd expect Discourse to scale fine, as it is already used heavily for large communities like python, with many tens of thousands of members.[1] The bigger question is about what interaction style they want, as Discourse is essentially a forum, which provides a somewhat different experience to chatrooms like Slack or Discord.

[1]: https://discuss.python.org/about

Discourse, anyone?

Posted Jun 16, 2025 21:21 UTC (Mon) by gf2p8affineqb (subscriber, #124723) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah. Discourse is a different thing. LLVM for instance has both a Discourse as a forum (replacing mailing list) and a Discord as chat (which makes the similar names quite annoying).

Discourse, anyone?

Posted Jun 16, 2025 21:36 UTC (Mon) by fraetor (subscriber, #161147) [Link]

Looking further down the discussion thread, kubernetes actually already has a Discourse instance, but it apparently doesn't get too much active use, at least not for on-going development activities.

Discourse, anyone?

Posted Jun 16, 2025 21:25 UTC (Mon) by fraetor (subscriber, #161147) [Link]

For some even more extreme examples, OpenAI's discourse has 959,000 members[1] and Epic Games has a whopping 4.6 million users![2] So 200,000 kubernetes users should be very doable.

[1]: https://community.openai.com/about
[2]: https://forums.unrealengine.com/about

Discourse, anyone?

Posted Jun 17, 2025 14:23 UTC (Tue) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

Discourse _does_ have a chat feature, although it's quite primitive compared to Slack.

I really wish Matrix (or, hey, sure, a suped-up version of Discourse chat) would take aim at what Discord provides — their "servers"are really quite nice for community-building and I totally understand why projects are drawn to it.

Discourse, anyone?

Posted Jun 16, 2025 22:36 UTC (Mon) by tux3 (subscriber, #101245) [Link]

There's also Zulip, it's open source and popular in some circles. Lean and Rust use it, although I'm not sure if those reach the same scale as k8s.

Discourse, anyone?

Posted Jun 17, 2025 18:53 UTC (Tue) by jberkus (guest, #55561) [Link] (1 responses)

We already have a Discourse: https://discuss.opensource.org/

It hasn't caught on as a replacement for synchronous chat. Today, it's mostly used by our Asian user community.

Discourse, anyone?

Posted Jun 17, 2025 18:54 UTC (Tue) by jberkus (guest, #55561) [Link]

Feh, wrong link!

https://discuss.kubernetes.io/

OSI also has a discourse. It's a really good platform.