Hi, I'm developing EffectiveDiscussions (ED), that is, the software this topic is about.
Because of the reaction in the very first reply above, I'd like to tell you how I found this topic: Some days ago I got a few emails & questions about ED. I was surprised because I don't usually get emails about ED. So I asked how did they find out about ED, and then they (well, one this far) linked to this Flarum topic.
Here are replies to comments above:
luceos
I wouldn't be surprised when the final version is only available as a cloud version
It'll take longer before a future-safe & stable way to install-on-own-server is available. Dealing with installations on people's own servers, is more risky. I cannot login & fix stuff that breaks, on other people's servers. However, without a way to install-as-open-source-on-one's-own-server, it'll be hard to make the software popular I think. And impossible (?) to find anyone who wants to contribute to the project. So I want to provide that too. Also, some organizations might want to install on their own server, because of security reasons.
f0r3v3r
"ED needs 4GB of RAM???? and redis??? ugh"
The development environment needs 4GB RAM. The prod env needs about 2 I think. Like Discourse. But I don't know for sure. (Had it not been for ElasticSearch (that's a Java full text search database), 1 GB ought to have been enough.)
And I cringe anytime someone mentions Docker in the installation notes
Hmm, interesting. Can I ask why don't you like Docker? To me, Docker kind of means: "You can be clueless about the languages and tech stack — instead, you need to learn some about Docker." Which to me seems like an okay tradeoff.
Digital
Definitely a Discourse clone
I copy (lots of?) ideas from Discourse, and from Slack (chat software). EffectiveDiscussions didn't start as a Discourse clone though. Instead I started in year 2010 when Discourse was still in stealth mode (or hadn't been started yet?) — and I built mostly the wrong things for a few years, until eventually I gave up and got a job instead. Discourse went public (I mean, left stealth mode) in 2013, and in 2014 I started copying ideas from Discourse (on my spare time). And currently from Slack too. There's a credits-to-Discourse link on the software's about page + in the GitHub readme.