Unless you are looking to contribute to a project and kick off a project I would recommend sticking with the bigger players our there like nodebb/vanilla and so on.
Getting stuff right is not easy, very few forum software platforms out there for example have a bug bounty like (https://hackerone.com/discourse ), last thing you want to do is deploy an XSS hive out there to the public.
As far as I know there is no small-medium well supported Discourse alternative written in Go. There is a Slack alternative though written in Go called mattermost which I can recommend.
I don't know on what depends, but I run a small Discourse forum... and I can tell you is a major PAIN!
I'm not a web developer (I develop mostly firmware) so I'm not into all this kind of stuff, but I know it is written in Ruby and runs in a Docker container.
It requires at least 10GB just to be able to install and 20GB just to update once in a while. It takes ages to compile. It's a PITA to update. Plus docker gets stuck with old images (not sure it's the right term) and you'll have to manually clear them.
20GB!! It's a freakin' forum software!!! Some triple A games are around 8GB.
I'm glad someone is asking for alternatives. I think all this overhead is because maybe redistributing a Ruby website it's a PITA and requires a full environment installation. And hell yeah I believe a simple test suite can take 10 minutes to run in that poorly conceived environment.
I don't want to seem rude, but to my ignorant eyes and those of its users, it's a forum software that requires a 10GB hard disk to install, and 20GB to update. I know that there will be a lot of technical details that will justify (or not) why, but, hey, that's a lot for a forum and there is no sane alternative way to install it.
I know. It surely sounds silly, but my guess is that instead of having to troubleshoot thousands of different possibl configuration with different dependency and OS library. The way it is currently distributed is not just "forum" software, it is the whole OS + Database and All other Software required along with Backup etc.
I wonder what annoys the Discourse team more: actual problems with Ruby, or discussions of how much better language X would have been compared to Ruby. I think Sam made a goode point on this sub-thread; the maturity and overall health of a project are more important than what language it uses.
(Disclosure: I did a few small contributions to Discourse a few months ago, but never got more deeply involved than that.)
