Ask HN: How do you talk to your GitHub community?

I work on an open source project with a small community. https://github.com/jtablesaw/tablesaw

I want a place for our users to hold discussions, ask questions, etc, that aren't bug reports or feature requests. We'd be lost at Stack Exchange, as the community is too small. I'm looking for an app like Discourse that is integrated with github. I've used gitter on other projects, and found the endless stream format awkward. What do you use for your projects? The only 'must haves' are sign-on-with-github-account, and asynch communications.

Gitter looks like what you're looking for.

This can entirely depend on the type of project and how many active contributors there are - if you have a lot of contributors then you may find more cross-user communications in which case gitter really does help (they answer each others' questions). If there are just a few people able to answer questions or just one (you), then using issues as Q&A would be good enough for now. The latter is quite common with apps rather than libraries. It is also more searchable which helps others.

Curious to know, how are you defining small community? I see you have ~100 watchers, ~900 stars, ~200 forks. Are you basing it on that, or some other criteria (# issues per week etc)

My project - I have a project with roughly same numbers as you. I did set up a gitter but everyone ignored it and emails me directly or just uses the issues. Despite not being actual issues, and despite its awkwardness, it's back to what I said earlier - searchable for people with similar problems in the future. I'll be sticking to issues until I reach hyper-popularity and then the gitter may revive itself.

I suggest Discourse too. Users can login with their Github account and you can deploy a small instance very cheaply in Digital Ocean. It's better than a chat and the content will be indexed in google quickly.

If you’re willing to add people to your org, you can make use of the team discussions in GitHub itself. It’s like a stripped down forum and is fairly hidden in the UI, but you can get to it from your org profile (or the team page for it).