This is an out there question, most likely. I love invoice ninja but am concerned about how spread out support is and that you seem to prefer slack, a big tech SaaS platform that is anathema to the digital sovereignty that hosting with open source products like Invoice makes possible. You even have a prominent link to slack in the app itself!
This Discourse site meanwhile appears to not have been updated in a long time and you have not enabled chat here which can do pretty much the same thing as slack, but without requiring your users to log into slack! There are also other improvements we are missing out on here like the sidebar, and security updates as well.
I also see there are alot of topics here in Site Feedback that are not site feedback and could be recategorized.
I am knowledgeable about Discourse so happy to help out.
Yes, I saw that too.. but Discord is just as bad as Slack, from a digital sovereignty perspective. It also spreads out support even further! It’s hard to see synergies happening amongst users and developers when they are all hanging out in so many separate platforms.
Many other very good open source projects (e.g. nextcloud) use the discourse/github split which works quite well. Though moving from github to a forgejo setup would also be welcome. Github is also owned by microsoft, a big tech company.
Thank you for your feedback! The chat feature in Discourse is much more limited than in Slack or Discord. I’m not sure the digital sovereignty aspects outweigh usability.
Is it? To be honest, I wouldn’t know for sure myself because I refuse to use those platforms. But Discourse chat has come a long way recently so I’d suggest updating this instance and turning it on again and seeing how it compares. There’s even excellent support for voice and video calling now though not sure that makes sense in the IN support context anyway.
Discourse also provides the benefit of having chat and forums in one place, so you can have asynchronous and synchronous support happening at the same time and find topics to refer to from chat to help answer questions, etc.
I don’t know about you and other users of IN but I am increasingly concerned about big tech and its impact on our well being as human beings and even democracy itself. I feel strongly it is worth taking a stand against it and making some compromises.
It’s certainly a balancing act (I am still having to use stripe, after all) but with some things like community support I think it is totally possible to decide to use ethical, open source solutions instead of making your users join slack and discord.
Thank you for engaging with me on this! Digital sovereignty is a journey and we’re not all in the same place and everyone has to move at their own speed. I will continue to try to participate with the IN community as best I can.