This post explains why SoFA Website and Software Development Circles chose Discourse as our forum platform. This is also a great place to discuss the choice 
Why not Facebook or other social platforms?
There are a few reasons:
Not supporting Tech Giants
While we do have a Facebook Group and engage on various platforms, we do not want to further the tech empires leveraging of its user base for profit.
Control our own data
When our data is held elsewhere it means that it is at the whim of that group. If Facebook decides to close down our group, it’s gone. All those conversations and references are gone.
Visibility
We would like to help make sociocracy and self governance more easy to find, and having domain connected content supports SoFA’s visibility.
Why Discourse?
While there are a number of forum platforms, we chose discourse because:
It’s easy
Setting up a discourse instance is super easy. Just spin up a docker instance and there you go!
It’s free
Discourse is a free open source platform with an active community of maintainers
It’s functional
Not only does it offer a wide range of (free!) plugins, but it doesn’t have a lot of bugs and is easy to use and has active maintainers!
It’s modern
Written in Ruby, discourse uses a more modern programming language than some other, for instance Wordpress based
The format
Discourse lends itself to discussion in a way that is a fit for the kind of in-depth conversation we’d like to see on the SoFA forums.
This is a simple explanation, but more discussion is welcome!