Are you nervous building a community on someone else's platform?
Hey community runners! I'm really interested in hearing from people who run Slack/Facebook/Telegram/Discord groups.
I'm interested in building a community myself and deciding between a self-hosted forum on starting a group on an existing platform.
What made you choose the platform that you chose? Are you nervous that platform changes could affect you, or that the platform's goals might not be aligned with yours? E.g. Facebook striving for data for advertising?
Do you have plans to migrate to something more self-hosted like a forum or even custom code like IndieHackers in the future if your community outgrows it's platform?
Are you trying to monetise your community in some way, and do you think the platform you chose is helping/hindering that? For instance I've seen that Discord has a Patreon integration that seems handy if you're trying to build a community from your existing Patreon subscribers.
Apologies for all of the questions, I'm just curious and trying to capture everything in one go. Keen to hear your thoughts!
Slack free tier definitely has limitations. I have gripes about community builders using Slack, because it really isn’t built for long threaded conversations. And the search limits make it a non starter for me. Discord is good for certain types of users, it depends. Personally I would look deploying Discourse on Digital Ocean or Heroku. Your costs will be very minimal until you have a lot of activity.
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