Discover Roundup: Mac Software Communities
This month's Discover Roundup highlights Discourse communities built around beloved indie Apple apps - NetNewsWire, Bear, and Infuse - where developers engage directly with users and peer support becomes searchable knowledge.
Welcome to our Discover Roundup, where we highlight communities doing creative and inspiring things with Discourse.
This month's theme: communities created around indie apps built for the Mac.
NetNewsWire
NetNewsWire is a free, open source RSS reader for Mac and iOS. Their new Discourse forum stays focused, with categories for Beta Testing, Syncing, Scripting, and a Lounge for talking about RSS and the open web.
Brent Simmons, the project's original creator, posts beta releases and answers questions directly. Users submit crash logs and receive responses, experiencing true open-source support.
Bear
Bear is a beautiful markdown notes app for Mac, iPad, and iPhone. In their Discourse forum, users compare tag systems and trade Shortcuts, and the Feature Request has detailed threads about YAML front matter and nested tags. The Bear Web topic tracks the browser version as it matures.
The Bear team responds to bug reports and feature requests, which keeps the conversation going both ways.
Firecore (Infuse)
Infuse plays every video format on Apple TV, Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Vision. The community has grown to over 11,000 topics across categories like Streaming & Network, Video Playback, Metadata & Artwork, and Suggestions, where users vote on features.
Most of the support happens peer-to-peer. Someone resolves a Jellyfin streaming issue, and the solution remains searchable. The forum has become a living knowledge base that expands with every question answered.
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!