I’m a member of another Makerspace. We use Discord as mostly a bulletin board but I think it could be better for how we use it. I’m wary of our reliance on Discord but people know it now. Discourse seems like a strong open source option for a Makerspace.
What plan do you use or do you self host? I’ve been looking at cost of hosting our own server on VPS. Thought I’d reach out to other Makerpaces.
Eric
We self host discourse on AWS, although we have our own set of servers that we keep at our on prem location as well.
For management side and love admin, discord (or an alternative) is sooo much better than Talk, although from a regular membership, discourse does work well enough.
Messaging platforms are great for realtime comms, awful for anything persistent, slow-moving, or structured.
Yeah, we use it for mostly the structured stuff. But I guess it’s easy to administer so that’s why people use it for everything. I think it does actually shift the conversation in a casual direction but it’s lacking for knowledge exchange.
I only use talk. Prior to joining the makerspace last year, I’d never even tried Discourse. I made an attempt but failed because I couldn’t even get a userid. The help and explanations I found all seemed like they were for someone who was already an administrator level user. So I abandoned it.
I just wish we had a decent mobile app 
Talk runs on Discourse I think.
For… ?
There is Discourse hub app. I tried logging in here but got an API error
For convenience?
Maybe if talk was more mobioe friendly the community wouldnt be split between two places in the first place.
Interesting, did you ever get it working?
Yes. I’m replying from the app now. 
Edit; I got it from the App Store called Discourse Hub. It’s not as slick as Discord. Discourse is better for forum discussion like this and Discord is better as an instant messaging tool.
Discourse has a “chat” feature that was added in some time ago. We decided against it at the time, and while we have revisited turning it on, we’ve shied away for a variety of reasons, but primarily that nobody we’ve worked with has ever tried it at any organization (and we work with a LOT of orgs that use Discourse!) so we don’t know if the juice is worth the squeeze, esp. with Discord already having been spun up (unofficially at first, then Board-blessed eventually).
For my $, Discourse, which advertises itself as “born mobile”,
has been good for both PM (notifications are near-instant, and if you turn on browser notifications, they arrive at your usual notification spot on whatever device you use) and “forum” conversations from the get-go. I was here for the Google Groups>Discourse transition, having just missed the GG heyday, but seeing the tremendous value in “one site to rule them all”- centering the conversation into one web site with multiple channels was a tremendous boon from the splintered “seek & ye may find if’n luck be on your side” world of GG.
Then Discord happened ( a necessary evil at the time, so I was onboard), re-splintering everything. Now every committee has decided to rule their own fiefdom with their own Discord server, and the Board decided they needed their own “official” chat platform, and we’re all over the map, now. It makes me very sad, because stuff is happening in those privately held servers that “plain ol’ members” never even get to know about, so they never know they might have been able to contribute or learn.
If I could magic-wand it, we’d return to Discourse-only for a united e-conversation platform, but the old idiom regarding shutting the barn door after the horse has left seems apropos here, as well as the adage from Lydgate: “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time."
-Wishing you the best of luck in finding your zenest e-com platform for your 'space 
A lot of squeeze for negligible juice: expend already-scarce volunteer hours to maintain two additional bespoke mobile platforms replicating what Discourse does adequately on mobile + desktop. As we’re neither in the business of hawking wares nor mining our users’ data for monetizable tidbits, the squeeze isn’t worth it.
Discourse is both a great messageboard platform on desktop and hands down the best forum platform I’ve used on a mobile browser.
One of the downsides and pitfalls of a volunteer-run organization. One very much gets to run the trainset as part of volunteering, which unfortunately includes balkanization. The effectively zero threshold to setup one’s own Discord “server” seems to encourage this.
I think maybe it’s a perception and generational thing. Discord feels like early Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. They are going to make it as sticky as possible and then when everyone is stuck on the platform they will make it worse because they squeeze everyone for money and cut expenses. Then when people get tired of it they’ll discover this thing they had in the old days, called “forums”. That’s the cycle
I wouldnt call having a single unified place for to communicate negligible, especially considering you cant even get the teachers all in on spot. But yeah building an app is a lot of work.
But im glad you agree having to manage and keep up with multiple platforms its a waste of time and resources.
Thank you for being so helpful Eric 
