Looking for feedback on my community forum generator!
After a few months of hard work, I just wrapped up v0 of my community forum generator called FORUM.LAND! The idea came about a while back when I was working on a different project; I wished I had a super easy way to collect feedback and respond to questions from users as well as putting info out there. Zendesk was clunky and difficult to setup, email worked but it was a pain answering the same questions over and over, and it was hard to organize information in busy Slack channels.
I wanted something like a personal internet forum, a digital public space. I absolutely love forums. I spend the majority of the day lurking on reddit, hacker news, and of course indie hackers, and I dreamed of attaching a lightweight forum like those to my own site.
After some repurposing old code, we've arrived here! If you want to see it in action, you can check out FORUM.LAND's forum here. I've noticed a lot of startups using a combination of Notion and Slack/Discord to solve this itch, but I personally found it to be an imperfect solution. Currently, I'm looking for beta testers to help me iron out bugs and give me some product feedback.
Feel free to shoot me a message at hi@forum.land if you're interested at all! I'm an avid builder but new to actually putting my stuff out there.
I really like the black/white design :). More seriously, how do you plan to compete with established solution like Discourse?
The main thing is ease of use.
Discourse currently doesn't have a free plan (cheapest is $100/month!), so to signup you need to input credit info and wait a day or two before someone manually reaches out to set up your forum which is a bit frustrating. With Forum.Land, it takes a minute to launch a forum since you can spin up our free plan without any manual oversight or credit info.
Another important part is no account signup required for visitors. On Discourse, visitors need to create an account to post and comment, which dissuades a lot of people. On Forum.Land, users do not need to create an account (like Discord) to post and comment (and don't worry, we have bot protection and optional moderation requirements so mods need to verify content before it's visible to everyone).
On top of that, a lot of quality of life improvements like subthreads, rich text editors, cheaper price, way more comprehensive security rules (everything from who can moderate, view comments and posts, edit etc are all customizable), and more. I created Forum.Land mainly from past frustration with Discourse and a lot of similar services.
Hope this is convincing!
Totally makes sense!
Btw I see that forum.land already supports "Login in Google", do you want to add support for "Sign in with SimpleLogin" to promote the privacy? Disclaimer: I'm SimpleLogin maker and am looking for early partners for our SSO button. Main advantage of early partners is visibility as partners will be highlighted in the communication to our community (~30K people). https://simplelogin.io/developer/