> I guess companies that use Discourse and have huge traffic can pay a bit more, nothing wrong with that.

The point being that said numbers aren't big traffic, they should be handled by a Raspi.

But for the sake of argument: Discourse is a painless move upwards for big budget and/or big knowledge entities. Nothing wrong with that.

On the other hand Discourse isn't a replacement for low cost, decentralized, easy to deploy, engine-diverse, low knowledge communities which were served by a multitude of PHP solutions in the past.

There's an economic argument for a growing divide between "communities as a service" ala Facebook and high hurdle deployments ala Discourse, but one doesn't have to be happy about this development.

So not sure I'm following, the php solution can handle huge traffic at a low cost with a conmparable feature set? How do they achieve that then? Taking a look at phpBB it looks like they are not using a framework (e.g https://github.com/phpbb/phpbb/blob/master/phpBB/posting.php). This is good for performance but pretty shitty for an OSS proeject, anyone looking to contribute here needs to start from scratch. Discourse happens to have 4x as many contributors. Also I can't imagine the feature set of the 2 projects is even remotely similar.

To be more fair, the PHP forums tend to be much older codebases, before standout frameworks and index.php front controllers.

Much like Wordpress and phpMyAdmin, these projects are basically victims of their own success.

> This is good for performance but pretty shitty for an OSS proeject

I don't see how. The repository seems to be quite active and has plenty of current pull requests.

The fact that there's no framework, you basically start learning the new codebase from scratch. With Rails I have a good chance of fixing a bug just by knowing the structure.

Well, an entirely non-profit -- at this point, in fact, unincorporated, with no assets to speak of at all -- writing group that I'm part of migrated their forum in 2019 from a PHP forum package (I think SMF, although I wouldn't swear to that) to Discourse, and it runs just fine on what I'm fairly sure is a $10/month Digital Ocean droplet.

I don't doubt that Discourse requires more resources than most PHP forum packages do, but it doesn't need that much more.