Discord/Reddit/FB/? Picking a community forum for creative users.
Touchgram app currently has a link to a now-missing support forum page which was on Spectrum.chat.
I have to fix that broken link and provide an alternative space, for my next app release. It's an urgent blocker (which I had completely forgotten about until final release testing!)
Spectrum was previously a great place for design-oriented discussions, Sketch and Figma had their official forums on there as well as many big design communities. Microsoft bought it and, after about a year, shut it down.
We have a very small user base but with new versions of the app and aggressive promotion, hoping that will grow to tens of thousands of devoted users. In particular, we want to have an arts community who resell their work through Touchgram's (forthcoming) marketplace. They are less likely to be sophisticated tech users.
Discord
Is growing rapidly from a gamer-based start, now used for many communities including designers and design tool support to which I belong, eg: Design Buddies which is the largest design community globally.
Can be very visually noisy.
Has native apps and desktop apps as well as web support.
More traditional forum look.
Have easy top-level r/touchgram so there for discoverability.
Very searchable.
Self-hosting on Touchgram.com
Our site is hosted on Zoho Sites. They have a couple of different offerings for forum/chat/support systems but seem aimed at commercial sites supporting a small number of users. Embedding something else such as habitate.io (from Pioneer) may work technically but don’t think will have persistent URLs. Seems likely to run into scaling problems.
We have an established, relatively quiet page, that could be expanded to host more community stuff. I’m a reluctant member of many Facebook groups. I’m a bit worried about having a public group on there as an overhead to maintain For some reason feel a bit nervous about having the app link directly to anything on Facebook especially as a risk to Apple App Store approval. (No particular justification for this, it’s just a gut feel.)
