As someone who maintains 5 different discourse communities, the #1 reason is ease of installation and maintenance. It was hands-down the easiest to install, an

As someone who maintains 5 different discourse communities, the #1 reason is ease of installation and maintenance. It was hands-down the easiest to install, and is the easiest to maintain. Self-hosting on Linode or Digital Ocean is cheap and easy. If you set it up right, it can act like an e-mail listserv as well. I have one instance where we migrated an old e-mail only community over to a private discourse (need to login before seeing any content). About half of the users just use e-mail to interact with discourse, including replying to threads, etc.