Let me go through it like this- What I like the most is Discourse. But I need to self-host it or pay for it. I don't want to do either for a quick study group

Let me go through it like this- What I like the most is Discourse. But I need to self-host it or pay for it. I don't want to do either for a quick study group or a side project. Zulip offers free hosting. I opened an account and spent the better part of 2 hours setting it up. I announced it. Exactly two people joined in. One of them wasn’t regular. Then I created a Discord, and 10+ people joined in every day. I don't want to use Discord, because I can't have direct contact with the users (discord doesn't share email with server admind/creators), Discord is bloated, it has poor search functionality. But what can I do? It's where the people are. It's what they want. Reddit was another option, but had criticsl mass problem there, too for some servers related to foss/group I admined.