What platform do you host your online community on?
So you're building an online community. A space where your people can hang out, ask questions, discuss, support each other. You can picture the people that might use it, you can imagine the great discussions they'd be having....
But where the heck is it happening?
Is this a subreddit? A Facebook group? A Google Group? A Slack channel? A community on Vanilla Forums, Mobilize, SalesForce, etc.... ?
Has anyone here started an online community before, and if so, how'd you decide where to host/build it?
Any trends you're seeing (or feeling yourself!) in terms of what people are sick of (I for one am done with FB lol) and what people are gravitating towards?
You can look into discourse forums maybe. It is free apart from the hosting. And it send nice summaries too. Worth a look.
Thanks! I've used discourse before for Seth Godin's The Marketing Seminar and it was really good as a compliment to an online course. They create a category for each lesson with a pinned topic at the top that had lesson video and description, then people could post their thoughts/"homework" underneath. They do have really nice summaries.
Visually I like how Mobilize looks and how the posts/threads are set up.
What I keep thinking about too is how much of a barrier it is to ask someone to use a tool that they're not familiar with. So it's not just proving that your community has value, but that it's worth learning how to use this thing and remember to log into this thing to continue to participate....