Discourse, anyone?

Posted Jun 16, 2025 21:18 UTC (Mon) by fraetor (subscriber, #161147)
In reply to: Discourse, anyone? by jjs
Parent article: Changes to Kubernetes Slack (Kubernetes Contributors blog)

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.