Let's talk about building community and owning the platform.
I started my forums back in 2019 and here ins 2024 I have over 6,000 registered users (it's free to sign up). I keep my forums public allowing the solutions me and all the amazing community members post there to be easily found by the search systems which has lead to a good amount of traffic. Currently I get over 7 million hits a week from over 50,000 unique visitors.
I am posting this because people should know that locking their data & their audiences up in proprietary platforms is not the best way or the only way to do it. I chose to build my forums with the open source tool Discourse
Relying on proprietary platforms for community building is akin to building a house on rented land, where the landlord can change the terms of your lease on a whim, or worse, evict you entirely. That's why tools like Discourse represent a beacon of hope. They're not just forums; they're fortresses of freedom in the online world, a foundation for a community that you and your members own. You're immune to the capricious whims of platform giants who view your community as mere data points for their algorithms. By owning your platform, you ensure that the community and its invaluable interactions remain yours, portable and persistent, a digital agora that can't be walled off or whisked away. It's about reclaiming the web's original promise: a space for unfettered connection and creation, where communities thrive on their own terms.
A link to my forums for those interested in joining
https://forums.lawrencesystems.com/
Here is a related post on the Discourse blog from last year.
https://blog.discourse.org/2023/06/how-lawrence-systems-built-a-thriving-community-using-discourse/
nixCraft 🐧
Kevin Beaumont