[eschaton]

It doesn’t, federation makes it not a web forum and its “web forum first” nature makes Discourse fundamentally unsuitable for things like technical work. (As opposed to, say, product support.)

If you want federation, set up a mailing list gatewayed to a usenet group you host on your own NNTP server, and slap a web forum interface on top of that for the whiny children who won’t use anything that isn’t inside a browser.

[micromacrofoot]

why is it bad for technical work? it seems like a very technical variety of forum

[eschaton]

It has all sorts of gamification that gets in the way, it’s easy to over-silo discussions, it has a concept of “answered” that’s not really appropriate for a lot of project level discussion, it has all sorts of other extraneous crap like “reactions,” and—most importantly—it’s fundamentally implemented as a web page that everyone involved needs visit regularly to see when there’s something new and to respond to that.

Discourse would be fine if it were a front end to a mailing list and didn’t have the excess categorization and gamification crap. Instead it’s a web forum with a mailing list mode tacked on by people who never did substantial technical work using mailing lists.

[micromacrofoot]

Sounds like a similar feature set to github tbh