Ryan on Mastodon asked a question about the forum software currently powering this site that I want to bring up in this topic:
The post says:
hosted on a service [Discourse] that uses AI and offers an AI product?
I turned off the Discourse AI features when I set up this forum. And the fact that the hosting is free and the software is open source is appealing. I don’t have the money right now to pay for hosting the forum in perpetuity (but maybe there’s some way we could crowd-funding it or some other option!).
But what Ryan says is true, Discourse has AI features and is seemingly developed with AI too from looking at the discourse/AI-AGENTS.md at 3b6713ef7768d10cee4f11d033e37f66a1ccad5c · discourse/discourse · GitHub present in the sourcetree.
What do others think about this? Is it a problem such that we should evaluate alternatives/migrating away from Discourse? What alternatives exist that are robust, mature, easy to host, and reasonable in terms of cost to host?