Speaking as part of the community and as “the tech press” – you’re making things harder to find if you disappear the blog into Discourse. A discussion forum != a blog or publication.
As I see it, Discourse is for the most active Fedora community members. The community blog and Fedora Magazine are for a larger audience. You’re going to have a harder time reaching more people if you bury the community blog in Discourse. It may be a more convenient thing to maintain and to publish - though I don’t see WordPress as particularly difficult for publishing - but less convenient for sharing and so forth. Also, TBH, uglier. Discourse is just not a good substitute for a publishing platform.
For the record, I do follow a number of RSS feeds from various Discourse forums. But I’m hyper-focused on Linux distributions. Will people who only occasionally cover Fedora also do so? I’m not convinced they will. You’ll be IMO reducing the number of people you want to reach in the tech press if you make this move.
I’d also look at the site’s traffic and see just how much you’re going to be losing by shifting it elsewhere if you do. Also also - are you going to be able to set up an RSS feed just for the community blog posts to syndicate to Fedora Planet?
ISTM that asking on Discourse is going to tilt the discussion in favor. Is this question being asked outside Discourse where people who don’t already have accounts can weigh in?
I am in agreement with @smoliicek, I think first trying to merge the community blog with fedora magazine would be a decent possibility. Maybe go for a two tab approach one more for internal stuff, one more for external stuff. As it stands Fedora magazine publishes less frequently, so it would always be nice to see more content there.
Discourse tends to be a text heavy platform that may not be suited per say to community blogs. The current format of the community blogs website is easy enough to read through, but the website name is a bit long. I don’t usually visit the community blog and just head over to fedora magazine to see whatever new stuff is going on. As far as workflow, it appears to have good integration with discourse already. Just my two cents really…more people are likely to visit and read through stuff (externally) if it is on fedora magazine.
So, just to provide some history/context here: community blog and fedora
magazine have very different intended audiences.
community blog → community members. People who are involved in fedora
and care about things like elections and changes in the project and how
it works.
magazine → fedora users. People who want to see neat things they can do
with their fedora install.
Of course it could be possible to merge them and use tags or something,
but I suspect if the magazine audience saw a bunch of project things
they don’t care about they would just unsubscribe.
FWIW, if I implement a new front-end for Fedora Magazine (i.e., “Headless WordPress”), which I plan to do to integrate it with the main Fedora Project website’s theme, it should be possible to display the Community Blog posts in a separate block/feed on the page, or even a completely different page, even if both Community Blog and Fedora Magazine used the same WPEngine backend to store the articles. Separating out the email subscriptions might be a little more difficult. However, if the WPEngine backend is integrated with this Discourse forum like the current Community Blog instance is, it might be possible to have the users get their email subscriptions/notices from Discourse rather than directly from WPEngine.
@kevin has the historical context correct. The Fedora Magazine preceded the Community Blog by a few years. The Fedora Magazine was an early experiment in having a single, unified publication in Fedora, versus the decentralized network of individual contributor blogs. Keeping up with several different individual contributor blogs is tedious and not all of that content by the author may be related to Fedora. The Community Blog was an answer to this challenge of keeping up with news and information as a contributor.
However, there are two distinctly different audiences we are writing for between the Magazine and Community Blog. One audience is the general public and Fedora users. Sometimes we push wider announcements and publications through there too. Another audience is an “internal” contributor audience. The goal is to provide useful information, context, and updates to our contributor community, so they can work together efficiently and effectively.
The discussion features that come with a tool like Discourse has made it interesting and useful to have as a way to have longer-form discussion. I think there is value in moving to Fedora Discussion.
Also, this conversation began from a point of burnout on the single maintainer for the Community Blog WordPress site. We can discuss about the merits of keeping on WordPress all day, but it is something altogether different when it comes to who does the work and maintenance to keep the platform configured and updated, and who fixes things when things break (e.g., the SSO login issues that kept us locked out of the Magazine and Community Blog for a few weeks).
I think keeping the Fedora Magazine on WordPress is sensible (or, until an eventual plan is made that involves hosting on the main FedoraProject.org CMS system).
Discourse is just not a good substitute for a publishing platform.