[sjfjsjdjwvwvc]

Speaking as someone who had to maintain a Discourse instance for two years: It’s mature and proven but still a lot of work to maintain. We went away from Discourse because it was not a reasonable use of time and not trivial - so you needed someone with dev skills to take care of it.

[bsder]

What are the alternatives that are less work to maintain?

[sjfjsjdjwvwvc]

Slack was the alternative. We use a service that creates a static page from all Slack conversations so this way we have a searchable index and can work around the messages disappearing due to the free plan. There are other limitations but it works well enough for a community of about 4-5000.