Discourse Discover: AI Communities Edition
Welcome to our Discourse Discover Roundup, where we spotlight communities doing creative and inspiring things with Discourse.
Discourse Discover showcases communities that are examples of what happens when thoughtful platform design meets engaged users. Many use Discourse to support commercial products and software, others to coordinate open source development, and some to build knowledge bases that become more valuable over time. The common thread? Communities that understand asynchronous conversation creates permanent knowledge.
Today we're highlighting three AI-focused communities that handle different challenges: a fast-growing developer tool, a massive collaboration platform, and a name that everyone should recognise…
Cursor Community Forum
Cursor's forum handles the unique pressure of supporting a fast-growing developer tool while staying genuinely responsive to user feedback. The community mixes bug reports with philosophical debates about AI-assisted coding, installation troubleshooting with feature requests, and threads where users share what's working for them.
The structure keeps different conversations separated without feeling rigid. Someone asking how to open Cursor from terminal finds their answer without wading through discussions about the product's long-term vision. Release threads give users a central place to share early impressions and surface issues after updates ship. The forum functions as both a support and product development tool, capturing sentiment that scattered feedback channels might miss.
Hugging Face Forums
Hugging Face runs a forum that supports a huge open source AI ecosystem - Transformers, Datasets, Diffusers, Spaces, and more. The trust-level system encourages new users to read before posting, maintaining signal at massive scale. Someone fine-tuning their first model gets patient responses in the Beginners category while researchers discuss optimizer implementations nearby. Both conversations coexist comfortably.
The forum's real value is accumulated wisdom. GitHub Issues handle bugs and Documentation explains APIs, but the forum captures practical knowledge from thousands of people solving real problems. That knowledge base becomes more valuable as it grows, turning the forum into living infrastructure rather than just a support channel.
OpenAI Developer Forum
OpenAI's forum tackles a technically difficult challenge: supporting millions of developers — from curious beginners to ML researchers — working with rapidly evolving APIs. Categories help to keep billing questions separate from technical discussions. Centralized announcement threads prevent chaos when major updates ship.
The forum shines when users solve problems the documentation never anticipated. A developer shares a clever prompting technique, documents it thoroughly, and creates the reference guide for that use case. This is the central tension for any company-run forum: how to balance official support with community self-organization. OpenAI succeeds by giving developers space to workshop solutions together rather than funneling every question through support tickets.
Discourse Discover highlights communities that show what's possible when you combine thoughtful platform design with engaged users.
We're looking for forums that have built something interesting, whether that's a thriving knowledge base, an active developer community, or a space where meaningful conversations happen at scale. If you're running a Discourse community and you’re ready for your close up, reach out to us at marketing@discourse.org.
We'd love to hear what you're building!