Discourse or Circle
Hi,
If you're building a community, will you use Discourse.org or Circle.so.
FYI, Discourse.org is an open source project and Circle.so is a SAAS.
Both of them are feature rich and battle tested, but of course with Discourse, you can self-host the community which is cheaper and Circle.
Do you think self-hosting, monitoring and maintaining* your community are too much a hassle?
*By monitoring and maintaining, I means boring stuff like backup, traffic, storage instead of keeping your audience engaged.
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I use Circle personally for my community and I love what it's becoming seeing as it's only a year or so old. And the flexibility in terms of customisation is really good too!
Basically turned slack, zoom, teachable, google cal into one platform - can't wait for what the future holds for Circle!
Holler if you have any specific questions, happy to answer! :)
Hey Redmon - How important is it that Circle lets you create your community on a new 'subdomain' ? Was it a deciding factor for you? Why am I asking? I'm a part of the team that's developing a similar solution; but we are taking a different approach to community building.
What approach is that? I thought there are only 2 approach which are using platforms like Slack or facebook group, and using custom domain routed to a community SAAS.
We want to take reddit-like approach, but still offer premium community experience. We've spoken with several potential community builders and owners; and one of the top problems is to get early users. I believe our approach will help solve that problem to some extent.
Would you be open to discussing this further? I'd like to show you our MVP. We're launching very soon.
i'm not super comfortable with the command line but i managed to setup discourse on digitalocean. not super hard with the marketplace package, and it costs only $5 per/month. now that i've set it up, i haven't thought about anything other than publishing content and engaging my community.
$5? that's a steal? I thought the cheapest droplet on digitalocean must be more expensive than that.