Discourse is one of the best pieces of software I've ever used — I self-host, and it's never given me any problems. There's built-in backups to S3, I can upgrade the software 80% of the time from a web interface (even on my phone), and the community and moderation features are incredibly well thought out. So much so that if you take the time to slowly go through all the options in the admin panels, you'd realise that the team has thought through 90% of all community interaction models.

I'm looking forward to trying Discourse chat — if the level of engineering and thoughtfulness is the same as the rest of the feature-set, it'll be a great addition to my community.

Discourse is nice software but I'm regularly irked but this hostile "growth hack" default setting. I don't want to follow every forum post after I've spent a total of 5 minutes on a forum asking a question about a weird compiler error.

[x] When I don’t visit here, send me an email summary of popular topics and replies

That complaint aside, I think it's a good platform for a technical forum because their search works very well, it auto-recommends similar threads pretty accurately, and the UX for reading a thread is fairly good. I expect they put as much thought into their chat app.

A very underrated application. But I like the simplicity of this .

While it works beautiful on Desktops and big screen. I find their UI clumsy for mobile. I hope they make some progress there.

Is there a link in this post where we can demo the Chat app? Like, a chat for the Meta discourse forum?

Sidenote: Discourse Forums seems grossly unoptimized in terms of what I'm downloading in the browser. Disabling javascript makes the site look pretty awful, yet I'm still downloading 170kb of CSS (post gzip... 750kb total).

Edit: ah, this is just an announcement, and not an actual release gotcha.

It's a shame this doesn't support or bridge to Matrix.

I see on this beta announcement there are a number of mentions of Matrix: https://meta.discourse.org/t/introducing-discourse-chat-beta...

Oh I thought it was Discord Chat and was very confused.

Can't wait to see what fascinating shenanigans they pull in regards to basic builtin browser functionality that they seek to "enhance" or subvert. Not a single god damn time have I wanted their thread search instead of my built-in browser page search. It's not my fault you think my browser can't handle all of the posts at once (it can; and regardless, imagine the hubris to hijack the browser's search because you're opposed to paging)