I am sure it is already on roadmap, but it would be nice to have a discourse instance to supplement zulip.
Interesting suggestion, it's not yet on the roadmap, what features are you missing on zulip?
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.
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.
GIthub discussions seems like a good contender as well, it would prevent needing to create another account.
A static site representation of zulip would indeed be good for search if everyone's ok with that.
Semantic search using vector embeddings for zulip+github would be great as well.
We should also totally finetune an LLM assistant on our zulip and github issues+PRs.
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.
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.
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
also generally you can use e.g. github/google/whatever via oauth, so the signup process is reasonable painless these days
Discourse is free (with hosting) for open source projects, so it's definitely something we can do if we want to
is that still true? I thought they stopped offering that a few years ago, but maybe I'm misremembering it
ah right, they changed the terms: https://blog.discourse.org/2018/11/free-hosting-for-open-source-v2/
but it's still available
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
Definitely understand about setting expectations. Happy to use zulip
Last updated: Jul 05 2025 at 12:14 UTC