I mean, honestly, I get it. This was a choice that we’ve been debating internally for months. Given that the Wordpress comments were becoming unsustainable, we looked at a bunch of different ways to flip—including something like a SCW Discord.
We landed on Discourse versus something like Discord for a couple of reasons. The first, and biggest, is because a forum like Discourse encourages thoughtful, slow engagement and long-term commitment. We want commenters who want to be here.
The second is because of the desire to run our own platform. Discord—to continue to use them as an example—is a hosted service with a questionable privacy track record and more or less impenetrable finances. OTOH, we’re self-hosting this Discourse instance on AWS EC2, right next to the SCW and Eyewall virtual servers. I believe very firmly in making sure SCW runs its own community, without having third parties involved. (Well, any more third parties than necessary—everything we do is hosted on AWS.)
Either way, I’m glad you commented, and I hope you’ll stick around and see how things go!