As you pointed out, while the codebase is technically open source, the lack of solid documentation and wider community support makes it feel pretty closed in practice. With just a few live instances and no hosted option, getting it up and running would mean a hefty setup effort and ongoing maintenance on your part.
That said, it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on, especially if it becomes easier to deploy or if it starts to make more sense given priorities and resources down the line.
From my perspective, worth a closer look. For the sake of participants, I prioritise intuitive ease of use over technical sophistication, but as you know Open Source is also a big priority.
It would probably be very hard to migrate posts from this forum to a new lesswrong forum - we looked at this in terms of porting the old github posts, and a big sticking point is user accounts which are very hard if not impossible to migrate. It would be a shame to have to start from scratch or at least go back a few steps.
Integrated wiki and customizable home page seem possible with discourse too, though subject to specific issues of detail. I agree about great design and good features for commenting and voting.
regarding commenting and voting, I think we want good voting functionality, but am also aware of sort of appreciating the fact that the current forum status does not participate in the very ‘Game A’ dynamics of trying to maximise votes for visibility. Perhaps that works at the moment because of the relatively low volume of posts, and when we have more we would need a mechanism for selecting higher quality posts, but something to bear in mind I think.
that we don’t want to get into crude upvotes and i’m pretty sure we will want some way to surface materials pretty soon.