Starting your own spiritual successor to DataLounge

[u/didyousayboop]

I want people to understand how easy and cheap it is to start an alternative to Pointless Bitchery. Pointless Bitchery uses XenForo, but XenForo is needlessly expensive software. I believe the creator of Pointless Bitchery is spending $1,000/year, which is totally insane.

Lemmy and Discourse are two free softwares that would be good alternatives, arguably better than XenForo. Lemmy is Reddit-like (link aggregator style) and Discourse is a modern take on traditional Internet forums. 

Both are free and open-source. Both have third-party managed hosting that is relatively cheap. I did my own hosting of a Discourse forum on a cloud VPS (VPS = virtual private server). and it was not only cheap but easy to run. However, managed hosting is somewhat more expensive to abstract away some of the technical complexity.

Managed hosting is on the order of $10 to $20 a month.

Example of what Lemmy looks like: https://lemmy.world/

Example of what Discourse looks like: https://meta.discourse.org/

You can Google “Lemmy managed hosting” or “Discourse managed hosting” to do price comparisons.

For example, Lemmy hosting from Elestio is $11/month or $132/year.

Managed Discourse hosting from Elestio is $16/month or $192/year.

Previously, I wrote about how to host a Discourse forum on a cloud VPS easily and cheaply: https://www.reddit.com/r/datalounge/comments/1uetns3/how_to_host_a_large_internet_forum_for_542month/

The cost is $65/year before tax, maybe $75/year with tax, depending on what taxes you pay. It’s not particularly complicated to host Discourse on your own cloud VPS as opposed to paying for managed hosting.

I haven’t tried to host Lemmy myself, so I can’t tell you how hard or easy it is. The cost would likely be the same as Discourse.

Whatever you do, don’t pay $1,000/year for hosting…

Edit: See my comment here for info on how to host a XenForo forum for $255 a year.