Harry

Yeah, you’ve more or less got it- you pay if you want them to host it. But the open source is just that, in that you can entirely self host the software on your own machinery. That’s exactly what we do. The only cost for us here being the cost of renting the server (Hetzner in this case).

So, for anyone wanting to create an account with our instance, it’s entirely free ☺️

Erm. It is.

https://www.discourse.org/open-source

Edit: join us and check it out yourself, if you like. We talk all things FOSS, Linux and gaming: discourse.gamerstavern.online

Discourse. Plenty of plugins and customisation to play about with. Self hosted, too.

Can check it out at discourse.gamerstavern.online if you like.

Huh. After all the Discord shite with face verification shite, me and my community (The Gamers’ Tavern) moved across to a forum first platform which also has live chat, and it has been an absolute breath of fresh air.

Bring back more forums imo

I covered this in this comment here: https://lemmy.world/comment/24536634

Google basically shuttered Tenor and heavily funded the replacement, which is showing sketchy early signs of ads.

Source: Klipy themselves.

Why Fluxer over Stoat, there is a lot to unpack here, but self hosting was much more mature and well thought out with Fluxer. Docker support was way beyond Stoat, and development is proceeding at a much better rate with mobile apps, integrations etc. We probably answer a lot of the questions here: https://blog.gamerstavern.online/innkeeper/about-community-and-communities

Worth noting that while Klipy is headed up by ex Tenor employees, Google has also heavily invested in Klipy.

At my community (The Gamers’ Tavern) we ditched Discord (when all the age verification crap started) in favour of Discourse and Fluxer (Discord clone, but open source and self hostable) and currently Klipy integration is offering a sketchy and vague pricing model that is looking like it is going to include ads.

So, that’s the vein that runs through all of this. Google killed Tenor, funded a new startup that’ll eventually likely be somewhere they can of course shove ads into.