mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06The customizable, scalable community platform powering over 22,000 communities. Create knowledge through conversation.
A GIF of Rachel from Friends doing a happy dance was duplicated 246,173 times on one Discourse site. 1.6 MB became 377 GB of backup bloat and broke a filesystem limit.
Turns out Jennifer Aniston can stress-test infrastructure:
Our new website is a Webby Honoree for 2025! We're incredibly proud of the design team at Discourse and the hard work they've put into this. #webbys
Are social platforms doomed to be overrun by bots?
And is the dead internet theory already inevitable?
We don't think so.
Discourse CEO Hawk explains why.
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/05/the-digg-lesson-why-moderation-infrastructure-matters/
For 5 years, our YAML automation was destroying comments. We sponsored psych-pure to fix it - and now Ruby can preserve comments during programmatic edits.
What does it look like to replace social media with forums?
We're finding out...
If you're a history buff, this is the blog post for you. We cover how multilingual support at Discourse evolved over 13 years - with some honest behind the scenes!
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/03/building-for-every-language/
Take a look behind the scenes!
Here's how Discourse built a system to roll out product changes without breaking anyone's forum - and why the answer was hiding in the codebase the whole time...
Our latest Discourse Discover roundup is live!
This month's Discover Roundup looks at three communities where builders show up with real projects, hit real problems, and get real help from the people who ~know...
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/03/discourse-discover-communities-where-builders-learn-together/
The short version of what we believe at Discourse: a community’s language should not be the factor that stops someone from participating in a community...
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/03/every-language-is-welcome/
New from Discourse...
This month, we're launching the Discourse Podcast with tech writer JA Westenberg!
We'll be talking with the leading voices in community about the state of the internet, coordinating humans and how we get from here to a better web.
More soon.
Category creation on Discourse just got a lot simpler. Fewer fields, better color picker + straightforward access controls. Advanced settings are still available when you need them. Enable in your admin panel under Upcoming Changes!
https://meta.discourse.org/t/simplified-category-setup/394971
Make outgrew their Facebook community. The fix: move to Discourse and turn scattered conversations into a searchable knowledge hub that works long after the conversation ends…
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/02/make-building-a-community-powered-knowledge-hub-with-discourse/
We build software around the idea that long-form conversation beats chat for real thinking - so we started asking why all that thinking was staying inside the company. Here's what happened when we challenged everyone to write publicly.
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/03/how-discourse-is-becoming-a-community-of-writers/
We started a podcast.
First guest is Sam Saffron who co-founded Discourse because he believed in the power of online communities.
We talked about what AI actually changes in an engineering team, how it unlocks moderation at scale and why trust is paramount...
Discourse offers 3 AI deployment paths:
- BYO API key (OpenAI/Anthropic/Google) → fast setup, low switching cost
- Managed AI → no keys, no ops; runs open-weight models on Discourse infra (data stays put)
- Self-hosted models → full sovereignty + fine-tuning + regulated use cases
One-size AI ages badly. Optionality wins.
What happens when you swap the scroll for something slower?
Keegan from Discourse spent a week off algorithmic social media. No Twitter/X, no Instagram, no TikTok, no LinkedIn feed...
This week's case study - what started as a conventional points program now operates as a community-led experience that drives ongoing engagement, connection, and long-term value...
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/04/case-stuhow-we-gave-brand-loyalty-a-community/
We’re increasing the AI credits on Discourse Free. If you've been rationing summarizations or second-guessing whether to use AI search on a thread, that calculation just changed.
We’re giving communities more room to actually use the tools the way they're meant to be used. 🧵
What happens when you swap the scroll for something slower?
Keegan from Discourse spent a week off algorithmic social media. No Twitter/X, no Instagram, no TikTok, no LinkedIn feed. Instead, he redirected that time to community spaces: forums, Discourse communities with actual conversations, and niche groups where people talk about things they care about...
Most feature request systems are where ideas go to die. Elfsight built theirs differently - public voting, status tracking, and developer KPIs tied to community-requested releases, all running on Discourse. The result: 700 features shipped so far.
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/02/elfsight-how-a-wishlist-category-shaped-700-feature-releases/
New on YouTube: our co-CEO Hawk on the state of online communities.
We dig into what's going wrong with digital spaces, how the attention economy shapes community culture, why open source infrastructure matters for community builders, and what sustainable stewardship actually looks like in practice...
Keegan from Discourse tells you literally everything you need to build your community...
Learn the exact setup: categories, AI tools, moderation, trust levels, and chat in 8 minutes.
Whether you're starting a community or scaling one, this covers it.
Discourse just consolidated tag management! 🧵
Every tag operation on selected topics now lives inside a single Manage Tags modal, replacing the three separate buttons that used to clutter the bulk actions menu.
acceptedAnswer from the Answer schemasuggestedAnswermainEntity from the Question schemaClean, consistent + standards-compliant.
This is the real-world experience of the AI translation feature we shipped in 2025…
Exactly what it’s like to use Discourse in another language.
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/05/what-its-actually-like-to-use-discourse-in-another-language/
Episode 3 of the Discourse podcast!
We're talking to Richard Millington about community, psychology, brand and what it means to bring humans together...
