Discourse is not getting much use, but we are not contemplating abandoning it as the public forum and knowledge base for use by WikiWe members. Meanwhile we continue to use Signal for agreements (e.g. charters and compacts), which should continue to remain the case. Signal has a huge advantage in being very well established and absolutely free to use, not to mention its security and privacy features, and inherent p2p architecture.
That said, those same features mean that Signal cannot be used as a forum for all WikiWe members. Among other things, past posts in a chat cannot be viewed except by the members who originally received them. Therefore we have considered and/or tried alternatives as listed below:
- Notion: good for documents and data, expensive ($25/mo/user), centralized
- Obsidian: decentralized, good for Markdown docs, $4/mo/user, too complex for most users, still our choice for admins
- Minds: centralized but NOSTR and Web3 interoperable; has network and encrypted conversations; no user fees, fungible Minds token; wonky onboarding flow
- Slack: centralized, gold standard for messaging, expensive user fees
- Telegram: a Signal competitor, more features but less secure
- WhatsApp: another Signal competitor, better known but less secure
- Discord: a popular open source forum app, cheap or free hosting, a bit confusing to use with a cluttered interface
- Discourse: open source, sleeker interface than Discord, cheap or free hosting, also popular
Does WikiWe need centralized community platform at all? If so, which is best? Why is our Discourse platform getting so little use compared to Signal? Reply in this thread and make your thoughts and questions known!