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Comment by alrayyes | Hacker News Reader

Discourse is pretty popular and easy to use https://www.discourse.org/.

And Slack/Discord are not good examples. You're just setting yourself up for a world of monetized walled garden hurt long term. Matrix however is pretty great.

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But Discourse is just old crap in new clothes. It reminds me of badly coded php forums of yore. It looks nicer, but without allowing dozens of external js files it just gets you a blank page. And their demo forum clocks in at nearly 5mb for viewing the index! Add to that bullshit like infinite scrolling and I really don't know why I would ever want to use this. We don't need new bloat that replaces old bloat just so someone maybe cleans up the presentation a bit.

Yes, i'm not a fan of JavaScript bloat either. But what would your alternative be? As of now, Discourse is the best alternative we've got.

I can't quite put my finger on it, but discourse forums always look very cold to me. Like an enterprise feedback aggregation where you're not sure if anyone will reply. It doesn't feel as explorable and cozy as older forums.

Yeah Discourse is great modern forum software in my experience as a user. So much so that I can imagine it helping lead a resurrection of forums, so much more pleasant to use than Facebook Groups (which I refuse to use)

If only. Too many people sadly go for the path of least resistance, which also has a plus side. People on forums are probably more likely to seek them out because they have their own issues with Facebook/Reddit.

True, having a bar to entry is a good thing I think when you see the majority of content on FB or Reddit

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