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Chatting with the creators and making friends is a great reason to create a Discord. But maybe don’t push everyone there for everything?

handwarmers 3y ago
I agree in principle - Discord can only scale that much - imagine having a discord channel instead of docs for Pandas . Obviously it would be best if there were great docs for everything, a lot of easily searchable Q&As + sample projects, and a forum and some form of live chat for the community to discuss ideas. But those take a ton of time to create, and a ton of skill to write well, and I feel like up and coming niche projects that need to build a community naturally would emphasize Discord over docs.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  The greatest communities in technology all have good documentation. There’s no reason to play fast and loose when you can just do the job right and document your tools.
  - spongebobstoes 3y ago
    Maybe Discord can be a starting point, and documentation can be written later. One way to think about documentation is that it is useful to help scale up support. But if there is no scale, it is less important.
    - kjkjadksj 3y ago
      That doesn’t seem very unix philosophy to me
      - handwarmers 3y ago
        The Unix philosophy has nothing to do with documentation lol. It is actually the exact opposite of your know it all hypothetical "no reason to play fast and loose when you can just do the job right" fantasy : "Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don't hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them." If anything, it is a lot closer to move fast and break things.
susam 3y ago
I use a Matrix channel (which is bridged to an IRC channel) for this purpose. I host computing book club meetups in the weekends. While the meetup main page and notes are hosted on a website, I have Matrix and IRC channels where the meetup participants can hang out together, follow schedule updates, make friends, etc. All our communication is in text format, so these open protocols and platforms serve our needs pretty well. The group members have the freedom to use any free and open source client or one of the popular web interfaces to join the channel and talk to each other. Should something go wrong with the Matrix or IRC network (say, the network becomes user-hostile for some reason), it is a simple matter of moving the channel to another benign network. The group members only need to point their clients to the new address. In fact, such a thing did happen once in 2021 when Freenode went through major staff changes due to disagreements with how the network was being run. All channel operators (myself included) moved their channels to Libera in a matter of days. It took me only about 5 minutes to complete the migration and hand out the new channel address to the channel members.

handwarmers 3y ago

I agree in principle - Discord can only scale that much - imagine having a discord channel instead of docs for Pandas . Obviously it would be best if there were great docs for everything, a lot of easily searchable Q&As + sample projects, and a forum and some form of live chat for the community to discuss ideas. But those take a ton of time to create, and a ton of skill to write well, and I feel like up and coming niche projects that need to build a community naturally would emphasize Discord over docs.

kjkjadksj 3y ago
The greatest communities in technology all have good documentation. There’s no reason to play fast and loose when you can just do the job right and document your tools.
- spongebobstoes 3y ago
  Maybe Discord can be a starting point, and documentation can be written later. One way to think about documentation is that it is useful to help scale up support. But if there is no scale, it is less important.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    That doesn’t seem very unix philosophy to me
    - handwarmers 3y ago
      The Unix philosophy has nothing to do with documentation lol. It is actually the exact opposite of your know it all hypothetical "no reason to play fast and loose when you can just do the job right" fantasy : "Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don't hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them." If anything, it is a lot closer to move fast and break things.

susam 3y ago

I use a Matrix channel (which is bridged to an IRC channel) for this purpose. I host computing book club meetups in the weekends. While the meetup main page and notes are hosted on a website, I have Matrix and IRC channels where the meetup participants can hang out together, follow schedule updates, make friends, etc. All our communication is in text format, so these open protocols and platforms serve our needs pretty well. The group members have the freedom to use any free and open source client or one of the popular web interfaces to join the channel and talk to each other. Should something go wrong with the Matrix or IRC network (say, the network becomes user-hostile for some reason), it is a simple matter of moving the channel to another benign network. The group members only need to point their clients to the new address. In fact, such a thing did happen once in 2021 when Freenode went through major staff changes due to disagreements with how the network was being run. All channel operators (myself included) moved their channels to Libera in a matter of days. It took me only about 5 minutes to complete the migration and hand out the new channel address to the channel members.