> Aside from the occasional annoyances of self hosting, that cynically I have suspected is just a way to drive users towards their hosted version
I'm a long-time Discourse employee and this is certainly not intentional, I'm obviously biased — but we help self-hosters out all the time for completely free on https://meta.discourse.org. We can't support every variety of configuration, but we consider every Discourse site progress, whether we host it or not.
Discourse has an AI plugin that admins can run on their community to generate their own sentiment analysis (among other things), though it's not quite as thorough as this write up! https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-ai-plugin/259214
We're always interested to see how public data can be used like this. It's something that can be a lot more difficult on closed platforms.
I'm a long-time Discourse employee and this is certainly not intentional, I'm obviously biased — but we help self-hosters out all the time for completely free on https://meta.discourse.org. We can't support every variety of configuration, but we consider every Discourse site progress, whether we host it or not.