You’re right…however in a perfect world I’m looking for more of a high-end generalist that can do it all, as I definitely expect that development will be necessary. If there aren’t any proverbial “purple squirrels” out there that can (or want) to do both though, then we’ll need to separate the roles and hire multiple.
We’re looking for a Community Management platform that has the features and usability of Reddit. Unfortunately we are not experts in Community Management tools, so are doing analysis a bit blindly.
We initially liked Discourse, as it is a pretty common open-source platform for online forums. However after standing up a proof of concept we are now highly skeptical that it scales horizontally enough for our needs…the concept of “infinite user-created sub-reddits” are an absolute must-have, and has been the major sticking point on the tools we have reviewed and piloted so far (including a number of proprietary non-open source options). Discourse themselves told us to limit the number of Categories that should be used, so my sense is that this is an inherent architectural limitation that can’t be overcome without significant investment and branching of the code base. Comment voting is also a must-have, as well as a few other things. We are finding that these seem to be strengths of Lemmy and other Reddit-style platforms. And Lemmy seems to be the most popular…with the most community support. However if there is another platform that might better option, I’m open to it.
We have a detailed feature roadmap/prioritization laid out. I only mentioned the two most-critical items that I am seeing as real differentiators between the tools we have reviewed. And we have evaluated quite a few in addition to Lemmy: Discourse was (is?) the front-runner, but also proprietary, paid, non open-source ones like Khoros, Verint, and numerous others.
The challenge is that:
a) My business partners are keen on the Reddit style interface, but it must be a standalone instance and white-labeled.
b) Our business case requires near-infinite sub-reddits, which most of these tools can’t provide
c) Our unique user base and business model is the special sauce of our investor pitch, not the tech. In a pinch, any of these tools can work, but we need something that scales in the right way. Replatforming down the road is expensive and impactful to users, whereas spending a bit of time up front to do tool eval is much cheaper. You can’t “fail fast” when it comes to significant strategic decisions like this.
d) We don’t yet have the funding for a full-spectrum, full-time dev team. We can afford one or two tech people part-time right now, with the assumption that standing up a pilot can be done part-time if the person has done it before. Once we are funded though, we can share fixes/features that we build back into the Lemmy community. That level of control is why I like open source tools over proprietary (where you don’t have the ability to modify code or define the roadmap priorities).
Hence we don’t want to build our own tool from scratch if Lemmy can check enough of the feature boxes. But I want to pressure test that, as I am concerned greatly about its overall lack of maturity as a platform (as @FleaCatcher also mentions below).