I'm appalled by the number of people answering this comment very negatively / quickly dismissing the self hosting option with a hostile tone.
Guys, it was very common for (side-)projects to self host a forum in the 2000s, what changed since then so that many people find this unreasonable? Or are you a vocal minority?
It's not like you have to host a service that needs 5 figures SLA.
I understand that people may not like having to host stuff, but seriously, there's no need to dismiss the option that harshly, calling forums "random shit" and so on.
Now people want it easy and free for everything: git hosting, website, communication tools… you can't have your cake and eat it too forever. It's very unfortunate those investors-infested companies running at loss made us used to this.
It's requiring that everything is free and easy that's an unreasonable stance, not suggesting to self-host or to pay. At some point things need to be sustainable. Even for side projects with limited time available. A community can't be managed if nobody has time for this anyway.
Setting up a forum is not the hard part in handling a community. Moderation is a lot harder.
> Guys, it was very common for (side-)projects to self host a forum in the 2000s, what changed since then so that many people find this unreasonable
I greatly prefer forums to ephemeral IRC or walled-garden Discord/Slack/etc. However I don't like the moderation time commitment, especially with in a climate of aggressive spambots and twitter-style idiocy at scale.
I also like blog comments, but those seem to have largely split into spam-filled cesspools on one hand and "comments are now closed" (after 10ms) on the other. HN is something of an exception, but I'm sure it requires aggressive and time-consuming moderation.
Constant security threats also make self-hosting an ongoing maintenance headache even if it's in the cloud.
If you don't care about the project, why even open up a Discord server you will never look at? The point with open forums is to get feedback and provide customer support
Yeah, the solution to using a Discord is host random shit yourself that someone _might_ maybe need. That's a hard pass. The very reason why I am on Discord is that I don't need to host my own shit. Been there, done that, I have better things to do.
You could hook it up to a mail provider and can host it yourself for less if you wanted.