https://flarum.org/ is really nice and modern. I donated to https://freeflarum.com/ and used my custom domain for their hosted free offering.

You could also check out Xenforo, which a bunch of the old vBulletin developers started working on after Jelsoft was acquired.

$215/year self hosted. Not bad. Thanks for the recommendation.

At their core, online communities are extensions of offline communities.

Yes, that core may attract people who never have and never will participate in the offline core and those people may dominate numbers (HN is a good example).

Online tools reinforce and amplify communities, but r/justinbeeber isn't bootstrapped. It exists because of the meatspace component.

Stackoverflow exists because people write code.

Facebook exists because people have offline lives...Facebook brings up the important point that there is no "Facebook community" all it's many communities have real world basis.

Anyway, "writers" is too broad. Experts will commune with other experts when they aren't busy writing and the platform will be dominated by people who like to dominate online communities (just like HN).

For what it's worth, if you don't care fifty-eight bucks a month that might signify your commitment level to the project. Or not.

Good luck.

I didn't want to put full context in the post as it could be distracting, but it's for http://random-character.com

There's a varied user base - some use it to help with writer's block, some chuck it into chatgpt to make some kind of game or story, some use it to practice art, and one of the earliest uses was some NPC generator. I do get questions in the suggestions form, which is weird because they often don't attach an email address to respond to those questions.

There's likely no offline equivalent, it's likely a bunch of people who come in from Bing to talk about similar interests. I had a Discord but it didn't click, maybe because of the lack of critical mass - there's just too many discord servers and nobody wants to stay in one with only a single person.

Also the other thing is I'm considering adding modding, and I'd like people to be able to share their mods, gauge interest, and get support. However, without a community, it makes little sense to allow mods.

Cool tool. It doesn’t change the basis of my comment.

The intersection of people who use a tool and the people who want to type into little boxes on the internet with people who do X typically approximates the empty set because most people don’t want to type text into little boxes on the internet.

People use hammers for tasks that use hammers not to be part of the-hammer-using-community.

What the context changes for me is the additional comment that building another tool (maybe for the same audience maybe for a different one) is probably a better use of your time than building a community platform for a non-organic community.

The tool works and that means people use it and move on. To a first approximation, it is finished…that actually happens sometimes. You’re at the point of diminishing returns. Or maybe negative if the community building effort distracts people from writing with popups and emails and pm’s.

Anyway getting good at building useful tools is a good skill. Part of that is recognizing the natural scope of projects.

Side note: It'd be nice if there was a paid Discourse alternative that was upvote/downvote style and also really well designed. Discourse is nice but I prefer upvote/downvote, I've seen other reddit clones but I prefer more easy to use UX.

Install Wordpress with a nice theme and use bbPress to start with. Or you can start with phpbb, that is also tried and tested.

Once you have built some traffic and have actual users. Only then move to a paid solution such as Invision or vBulletin.

There’s also Vanilla forums: https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla

And the engine behind Lobste.rs: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters

Oh, this might be just what I'm looking for. Thanks!