I’m adding my two cents here as someone who has built two projects using Strapi, one personal, and one professional: I think that the option of moving entirely to Discord would be a loss for the ease of adoption of Strapi.
Strapi is as much a development framework as it is a “plug & play” SaaS product. The docs are good but don’t cover all the use cases that people have. This forum has helped me on several occasions to accomplish things and solve problems, mostly by me finding existing topics here via search engines (mostly DuckDuckGo). For some, see my likes history.
From my perspective, a migration to Github Discussions seems the best option forward among those given (other than keeping Discourse).
In any case, I think it is important that Strapi keeps controlling a searchable, web-exposed community space where community discussions can occur. Otherwise, you give SEO ground to some of the LLM-generated crap that proliferates today, degrading the experience of (possible) users looking for answers.
Regarding Discord: I’m personally not enough on Discord to say this with confidence, but I think it’s fair to assume that:
- It decreases (eliminates?) the ability of users to find solutions online with a simple search (the SEO argument)
- It forces all community support to happen in a walled garden built on closed software
- What if in 5 years Discord decides to hide history and starts charging per user, just like Slack does? I’ve observed how this degraded several Slack communities.
I’ve also seen the Discord-Discourse commentsBot integration in action, but this has lead to my Discourse summary emails only including long community threads from commentsBots talking to each other, which I think are confusing and messy. I wouldn’t miss that integration overall.
Regarding GitHub Discussions: for me, GitHub has had a better track record of findability and being useful for development, also in relation to Strapi (despite it being closed software, too). Here is just one example that helped me in Github Issues.
I generally find the organization of GitHub Discussions more chaotic than Discourse topics, although I also see them being used by so many orgs (Immich, Photoprism, Paperless NGX, Nextcloud Desktop, … from the top of my mind).
Maybe you can identify the most helpful/visited topics using Discourse’s built-in analytics, and move those over? Having a dead read-only forum seems messy too.
You’ll also need to clarify what goes where. For example, there is now also the Canny instance for feature requests. Are you intending to keep that one?
This rings true:
Probably there will be some work regardless of which platform you use. But I understand that you want to lower the platform surface and focus your efforts as a company.