kanishka (Jul 08 2023 at 12:17): kanishka (Jul 08 2023 at 12:17):I am sure it is already on roadmap, but it would be nice to have a discourse instance to supplement zulip.
Anton (Jul 08 2023 at 13:23):Interesting suggestion, it's not yet on the roadmap, what features are you missing on zulip?
kanishka (Jul 20 2023 at 03:27):I am not sure, brand new here. In other langs, I am used to the longer discussions, search hits, and general slower pace of discourse alongside chat.
Hannes (Jul 20 2023 at 08:18):I think because Roc development is moving so fast and I know Richard wants to limit expectations for the language at the moment, it might not be a good idea to have a public Discourse yet. I think Zulip fulfills the same purpose as Discourse for now, you can treat it as a chat like Discord/Matrix or as an async forum like Discourse.
One day I'd like a Roc Discourse too, the downside of Zulip is it isn't indexed by search engines, but I know the Julia Zulip solves that by having a Zulip stream for public discussion which gets converted to a static side for search engines.
Anton (Jul 22 2023 at 10:06):GIthub discussions seems like a good contender as well, it would prevent needing to create another account.
Anton (Jul 22 2023 at 10:06):A static site representation of zulip would indeed be good for search if everyone's ok with that.
Anton (Jul 22 2023 at 10:06):Semantic search using vector embeddings for zulip+github would be great as well.
Anton (Jul 22 2023 at 10:06):We should also totally finetune an LLM assistant on our zulip and github issues+PRs.
Richard Feldman (Jul 22 2023 at 12:13):Anton said:
GIthub discussions seems like a good contender as well, it would prevent needing to create another account.
I've actually found the separate login to be a feature rather than a bug, because it filters out a lot of low quality comments. I see a lot more flame wars and people being angry at each other on shared-login discussions like Reddit and GitHub than I do on community-specific discourse instances.
Richard Feldman (Jul 22 2023 at 12:15):A plausible explanation for this is that a lot of these types of comments come from people who don't actually participate in the community, but who have opinions they want to share - and they often don't bother do that in a friendly way because it's not their community and they don't care.
Richard Feldman (Jul 22 2023 at 12:16):And the extra friction of having to sign up for a separate account seems to filter out a lot of commenters who fit that description
Folkert de Vries (Jul 22 2023 at 12:17):also generally you can use e.g. github/google/whatever via oauth, so the signup process is reasonable painless these days
Anton (Jul 22 2023 at 12:59):Discourse is free (with hosting) for open source projects, so it's definitely something we can do if we want to
Richard Feldman (Jul 22 2023 at 13:15):is that still true? I thought they stopped offering that a few years ago, but maybe I'm misremembering it
Richard Feldman (Jul 22 2023 at 13:17):ah right, they changed the terms: https://blog.discourse.org/2018/11/free-hosting-for-open-source-v2/
Richard Feldman (Jul 22 2023 at 13:17):but it's still available
Richard Feldman (Jul 22 2023 at 13:25):the thing they stopped offering was having free instances on your own domain, e.g. Elm's is discourse.elm-lang.org but we can't get discourse.roc-lang.org because it has to be on their domain now
kanishka (Jul 23 2023 at 14:24):Definitely understand about setting expectations. Happy to use zulip
Last updated: Jul 26 2025 at 12:14 UTC