I have done quite a bit of discourse administration and self hosting, mostly pro bono, some consulted, over the last ~5 years. I like a lot of things about discourse, especially since Jeff Atwood stepped aside a few years ago from the leadership role - IMO, and this was more true 5-7 years ago, there were some fairly draconian design decisions and a kind of snottiness from Jeff in some of the comment threads over the years where I was looking for advice about how to solve a problem. One that particularly rankled me was him scoffing at routing traffic through cloudflare, especially its CDN, claiming that "we are a javascript site not a bunch of static pages served by HTML" and recommending not to use cloudflare at all because it "breaks discourse terribly." This is turning more into a gripe about Jeff Atwood and not Discourse, but, pages like this [0] popping up are a good sign they're finally coming around. There were some performance decisions that have rankled me as a sys admin, particularly the way it cannot handle very large threads (called "topics") without being a risk to DDOS'ing the entire site. Every time it's come up the response has been "you do not need large threads, this is not a chatroom" with dozens of community owners chiming in with the myriad of ways they do actually need large threads.

Aside from the occasional annoyances of self hosting, that cynically I have suspected is just a way to drive users towards their hosted version, I do find it impressive software and by far the best at what it does. One thing that particularly impresses me is what I call the "discourse speed run" where I can advise someone with mild technical skills how to spin up their own self hosted site in just a few hours. That is very impressive to me. Their deployment scripts are well written. When you deviate from what they "recommend" though, like hosting outside of digital ocean, is where it gets a little murky and you might need to get hack-y.

[0] - https://meta.discourse.org/t/using-discourse-with-cloudflare...