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Comment by urza | Hacker News Reader

If I can't self host it and own the data, I am not interested.

Self-hosted forums already exist (like Discourse), but adoption has been low. I fully support self-hosted forums, but I think they'll never achieve mainstream without a hosted option.

I am also interested in self-hosting, I really dig the design and interface but not being able to self-host is a no-go for me. Discourse is just terrible overall and the only other real alternative is xenforo which is extremely pricy.

I'm absolutely open to supporting self-hosting under some kind of enterprise license, similar to Github. If this is something you're interested in, shoot me an email and we can try it out.

I would be interested in a self-hosted version as well; though have additional questions about administrative items. A return to forums and not a 'feed of high engagement' is sorely needed I think. Unfortunately, so are moderator tools and certain things of a web application that people have come to expect.

Yes, that’s why I don’t support “open signups” yet - I want to avoid spam fighting for now.

There are some moderation tools build in, and some where the API is done but just needs a front end finished.

Which major features do you feel are missing?

Send me an email (Philip at contraption.co) and we can discuss self hosting.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. It is a common monetization strategy for open source projects to offer a paid hosted option in addition to free self-hosting. For example, you can self-host Matrix (synapse, dendrite, and conduit) but you can also pay the creators of Matrix to host it for you[1].

[1] https://element.io/pricing

Yeah, that's fair - Discourse is a different forum software that follows this playbook.

The lack of a unified backend makes it much harder to build native mobile apps.

> The lack of a unified backend makes it much harder to build native mobile apps.

That response comes across as disingenuous. The lack of a unified backend makes a lot of monetisation models hard, but should pose zero problems for native mobile apps. Point at an API and done.

Adoption is low because Discourse just sucks. I just looked up something on the Docker Discourse - it took 8 seconds to load and made 80 requests. I just avoid websites that use Discourse. PhpBB sites loaded faster on my 256Kb/s back in 2006.

Contrast is also low and it's just bad to read. Too many UX people touched it.

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