Does GitHub discussions fill those requirements reasonably? https://docs.github.com/en/discussions

An example of this - https://github.com/nodejs/node/discussions

Github discussions scale quite poorly if you have hundreds or thousands posts each day.

Also, for nonprogrammers Github is a really alien place.

And it is still proprietary lock-in.

But yes, it can be a viable alternative and at least is not asking phone number for read only access.

The discussions scale is a problem of you need people specifically triage and moderate the content. For large projects, I'll grand that this could scale poorly but for preserving information and discussions, it remains better than other options.

And yes, GitHub isn't the proper spot for non-programmers. All the workflows around it are geared to hosting a software or at least a site.

The proprietary lock-in... I don't agree with in that if that is an issue, then discord is too (and likely more). GitHub exposes the information for discussions quite easily - https://docs.github.com/en/graphql/guides/using-the-graphql-... I would be willing to take the stance that any forum that you don't host and access the underlying data without needing to go through the user facing application is lock in. With GitHub discussions, the access to the underlying data is more available than any other forum that you don't host yourself.

FWIW, from my work machine I access GitHub without issue. I can't access discord and will likely be unable to persuade such a change up the chain as Discord is largely seen as primarily chat for non-professional activities.

> The proprietary lock-in... I don't agree with in that if that is an issue

I was thinking here primarily about network effects.

Discord has almost twice the active users and probably not a great deal of overlap with GitHub. And people won't necessarily want to join a community they would join on one with an account made on the other.

I get the impression that discord users are mostly children and not programmers.

While there might be some overlap as discord users grow up and decide to keep their discord account, I'm guessing that even in that case they will have a separate github/gitlab/whatever account for their professional or unprofessional programming.

There are a ton of very active programming related channels, mostly for open source projects. It's quickly replacing freenode as the place to go to chat about projects (love it or hate it). In fact, it's markdown support for code blocks is unmatched (imo and compared to Slack/Teams/etc) and is actually very nice to use as a place to discuss programming.

Github for some reason disables search engine indexing of wikis, not sure about discussions.

The problem that they have (and other user content created sites) if indexing was on is that SEO spammers use it to dump lots of links to sites.

That you don't see this is an indication that it works and dissuading those spammers.

Consider all the nearly forgotten repos out there that you occasionally stumble over and that there are no "work from home and get $30/hour - click here" or a dozen forms of "somespam.example.com" links peppering it.

Compare that with the old Wordpress blogs out there that haven't disabled comments and yet still have search indexing (or not, but spammers don't always dig far enough to see if there's a nofollow attribute on links).

So, for the most part, GitHub isn't indexed by search engines - and its across the board for the entirety of the site. Spammers realize that it is pointless to attempt in any of the forms that they could on other user created content sites and so expend no effort at all to post spam links.

Github discussions is searchable within GitHub in that repo. For example https://github.com/laravel/framework/discussions?discussions...

The wiki is fairly useful - and again, if you are searching for content in GitHub you can search wikis ( https://docs.github.com/en/search-github/searching-on-github... ) and get only content within GitHub (without having to sift through Google search results) with arguably a more powerful query language than Google's search bar ( https://docs.github.com/en/search-github/getting-started-wit... )

Personally, if I am looking for content for a FOSS that is hosted on GitHub I use GitHub's search for discussions and wikis first before trying to search for content in google.

But this doesn't explain why Issues are indexable on Google

What's the difference between a spammer creating their own repo and creating a bunch of issues with spam links vs their own repo and creating a bunch of wiki pages with spam links?

The difference is likely the ability for the community to flag and moderate a comment rather than an entire wiki and repository.

That said, the wiki workflow, permissions, and limitations in formatting may push people who are after a more durable store of information to create a GitHub pages site which is then managed with the same workflow (forks, pull requests, and reviews) as code, along with the ability for search engines to index the GitHub pages site.

> has decent interface with minimal ads

For now, while they still in "bait mode". If experience has something to show in the web is that once they go into switch mode, the more and more ads will come, interface will become worse as in a bad Facebook clone, site will become intentionally unusable on mobile to force people to install the app (with even more ads and tracking!), every minimally controversial subject for the advertisers will be banned, platform will start requiring phone numbers ("It's just to prevent spam and recovery your password, we swear!!"), an algorithmically controlled timeline will appear to improve engagement, text or longer posts will be de-prioritized to give more visibility to low-effort easy-consumption meme-like content (that give more of the said engagement), and "out of community" content will be pushed into it.

Reddit is currently best example of this happening.

Am I too pessimistic? Nope, I just saw this happen too many times.

If you want to build a future-proof online community, be prepared to deploy and control your own infrastructure and lose the "easy to get" users. Won't the cheap and won't be easy.

Oh definitely, especially given proprietary lock-in and effects of scale.

That is why I put "Right now Discord has great usability"

> platform will start requiring phone numbers

That is de facto happening already.