Discourse Will Never Block You From the Web

Reddit has now started forcing its mobile users to install their app.

Open reddit.com on a phone and you'll hit a popup with no dismiss button and no "continue to site" option. It’s either install the app or leave.

Fact: Discourse will never do this. 

And we want to explain why…

The web is not a funnel

The motive behind Reddit’s move is revenue per user, and the mechanics are simple. Browsers limit what a company can extract from you and apps don't, so Reddit wants you in the app. Inside the app it can fingerprint your device, push notifications whenever it likes, sit on your home screen, and condition you to open it without thinking. Every tap and swipe is a data point it can sell to an advertiser. Use Reddit in the browser, though, and they lose track of you.

We’ve always been on the other side of that calculation. We built Discourse on the premise that communities should own their software. You build the conversation, you build the contributors, you build the archive, you build the audience, and you keep all of it. In practice that means no dark patterns nudging readers to install anything, no forced login to read a thread, no app walls between a reader and the words on the page, and no roadmap to add any of it.

Admins get to decide whether their forum allows anonymous reading. We think they should allow it by default, and we ship Discourse that way. We maintain the mobile web client, and we'll keep maintaining it for as long as Discourse exists.

Apps are additive

We do build and maintain a native mobile app, Discourse Hub, and we think it's pretty good. Hub serves the same content the website serves - and nothing is hidden or locked up behind the install. The browser version isn't a second-class citizen and won't become one. Tap the icon on your home screen, or follow a link a friend sent you in Slack, and you land in the same forum reading the same thread.

The instant a company wants its mobile website gone, that company has stopped serving its users and started serving its investors. 

When the platform controls the app, the platform controls everything inside it. It picks what you see, what it pushes to the top of the feed, what it buries, and what it sells against your attention. The mobile web is older and - we think - a lot better than that. You  get HTML, hyperlinks, search indexing, and back button. People come and go at will, Google and Bing and Kagi and DuckDuckGo and Brave Search index the pages, other sites link to them, and researchers quote them. No company owns the protocols, and anyone with a server and a domain name can put up a site that uses them.

When a company pushes its users out of the browser and into an app, it tightens its grip on every interaction. Advertisers pay for that grip, and the only people who celebrate it are the investors who hear about it on quarterly calls.

Where communities live

People arrive at reddit.com from search engines, group chats, academic papers, and Slack threads. They show up without an account and without intending to "join" anything, because somebody linked them or Google pointed them at a four-year-old answer to a question they typed in. It’s what enabled Reddit to become the front page of the internet - anyone could walk in the front door. 

Discourse communities run on the exact kind of open access reddit.com used to have. A reader Googles a problem and lands on a four-year-old thread that solves it. They can read for months without signing up. They can answer somebody else's question one day. A few months later they can be moderating. Block the front door and that whole sequence stops happening, which means you lose more than the casual visitor; you lose the “library” visitor who might have stayed, the contributor who didn't know they were one yet, the four-year-old thread that keeps doing work for years after its author moved on, and the only good reason to build community software at all.

A forum that anyone can reach, read, link to, and search through is a community in the older sense of the word. That same group of people behind an app wall isn't a community at all; they've become a userbase, and the people running platforms measure and monetise their userbases without ever talking to them.

Discourse exists in part because forums have outlasted every wave of social network so far, and communities keep choosing forums when they want a conversation to last.

The web is where those communities live. 

We're going to keep it that way.