New atproto community discord

Discussion
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Talking to Patak from npmx about their active and friendly Discord, I am wondering if we should kick off a new atproto community Discord.

The goal would be to collectively do this, and form a community culture together from scratch. This might also come alongside a new atproto community co-op (stay tuned on that).

Background

ATProto Touchers Discord (which I made a short link for https://discord.atprotocol.dev) exists, and has lots of activity.

It’s kind of unmanaged / unmoderated other than nuking spam accounts, various people have admin status (including me). The bsky team at one point was sending support requests here but not being active there (fixed now, I think).

For atmosphereconf 2025, @psingletary.com setup a Social / Events Discord https://eventsdiscord.atprotocol.dev. It’s not very active likely because it’s not promoted often. Patrick manages it.

I have a “builder’s collective” Discord I started where some private groups of various kinds are – e.g. conference producers channels. I don’t want to be personally responsible for growing such a space, hence this proposal to kick off a new one that we grow together.

Paths Forward

Gather a group of people interested in working on having a friendly, managed community space for growing the atproto community.

  • Onboarding and community welcome for new joiners
  • Groups and roles with public/private access so we can have it as a shared resource
  • Resource for regional groups that want it (some run Signal Groups)

Options

Could we approach current ATProto Touchers admin to transform the current space into something a little more managed and welcoming?

Events Discord purpose is ideally is folded into a new community discord, so we have social & tech altogether rather than separate.

I don’t want to kick off a whole discussion about things to use other than Discord. People are welcome to run other things, but we have a Discord we could make more welcoming, we have examples like npmx of great spaces running it (they also use Signal Groups / Calls).

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Suggested ATProto Touchers Discord Upgrades, new mods
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I haven’t pinged current ATproto Touchers admins on this yet.

My thinking on this is that forming a collective group of people to start from scratch is in itself a community barn raising process, where we can help form norms.

At the same time, ATproto Touchers has a lot of people and activity in it! Could totally revamp that in place as well.

Not my decision to make!

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If the AT Proto Touchers is amenable to it that seems like a great place to do it, I’d be willing to volunteer so roles / channels could be migrated from Social events and we’d be mostly on that server

Otherwise, I’m willing to revamp Social events to cover sever channels / roles for developers

However, I think we need to make a team effort to clearly state where all the right places to have conversations should be
Maybe we start with atproto.dev/resources listing all the discords / forums / websites and figure out how to consolidate so people can find the right places for conversations

This way we can define the difference between what happens in discord and what happens in discourse and what gets documented in wiki

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I made https://links.atprotocol.dev with some of these things.

And yes aggregating disparate spaces and resources is important. It’s the lists of lists problem again where everyone makes their own list!

On my backlog is to list out the resources that the community fund has / hosts / can share.

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What’s the driving factor behind wanting to create a new Discord? Like, what’s the specific problems with the AT Proto API Touchers one? It sounds like it may be lack of a dedicated governance structure and moderation. Is that it?

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I vote for sticking with the ATProto Touchers Discord, it feels like home. I think the bulk of the community is there, It’s where a lot of folks have been directed to for over a year now and has a pretty good group of people helping with community support

I keep the #pds-operators channel’s notifications on all and try to help there when I have the availability. Happy to keep doing that where ever it’s decided and take on some other moderation burden if needed as well as branching out to some other channels a bit more.

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Maybe make sure the group’s scope is well defined. I shied away from the Atprotocol Touchers because I thought it meant the people defining and developing the protocol itself, not those of us using it to build things.

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I think this is an example of how the space doesn’t do a good job of welcoming people and directing them where to go.

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Because the current space isn’t set up as a collaborative community space, dedicated volunteers to support a welcoming experience for new joiners, etc.

So, my idea for a new Discord would be to get collaborative buy in and setup from everyone, so everyone could help grow a community experience together from the beginning.

I also want to float the idea generally before approaching current server owners and seeing what they think.

(I may be overthinking this and it’s not that hard to evolve what is there now if everyone agrees, but I kind of like a ground floor approach)

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Oh for sure, I know that established people are fine with it and found their way there. If current admins are OK with it, we may be able to evolve it. More below

I think less about moderation but more about welcoming setup and guidance.

Can you think of anything you see in npmx that you’d like to see in Touchers?

Is there anything about Touchers you really love? anything you’d like to improve?

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I do agree that there’s a bit of a divide in the server.

  • On the one hand, it functions as a space to ask for technical advice with particular implementation issues/questions regarding atproto and sharing your work.

  • On the other, it’s meant to function as a space for broader discussions surrounding the broader atproto ecosystem outside particular implementations. Things like WGs, conferences/meetups, sociotechnological discussions, stuff like that.

I think that there’s some tension between the two. It’s not impossible to divvy up these goals, but, since people tend to gravitate towards a few main channels, I feel like compressing these makes it more difficult to talk about both constructively and consistently. It’s kind of why I’ve stopped checking the server as much. I’m definitely more interested in the latter than the former, since those are the discussions I can better engage with (Given I’m not really a programmer).

I’m softly in favor of another server for these discussions, but I’d like to know what other people think as well.

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I think it would be best to keep the current discord, since doing otherwise would further fracture the community.

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making the discord a community server with onboarding and resource pages would go a long way to do that
additionally a help channel + people with helper roles (they could be mods, but don’t have to be) would go a long way with personal interaction rather than just onboarding process

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Just joined the Discord. I like the idea of consolidating into one. I think we should maybe change the name but that’s a bikeshedding event onto itself.

It would be great to have a Community category for all the local meetups. Would be useful for planning/coordinating meetups. @atproto.nyc, where you at? :slight_smile:

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Joined The Touchers a few times, but never stayed because it’s all work and no play.

Agree a lot with @psingletary.com about onboarding improvements (and fun).

Need space to welcome general bsky users and help guide to new AT experiences.

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@psingletary.com - you need another admin? Ran a very large discord during the pandemic and learned a lot about community management and cultivation, so happy to help!

I think we can do a good job growing touchers, even possibly fully rebranding it.

I’d like to see it really have a team of admins from different groups and communities operating in a commons-structured way.

There’s a lot we can do to make it better, but also, we should ask the most important question:

Is Discord even the right platform?

It is closed-source, has kind of terrible performance in general, continues to clutter the interface with games-focused content, doesn’t integrate natively with atproto, and has somewhat of a very overwhelming interface for many people.

Have we considered any of the open source solutions that are actually focused on what we’re focused on? I know there’s a lot of great feedback about Mattermost, we’re using Zulip with EAR (i’m finding it interesting), so I thought it was worth a mention.

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I know for our welcome channel we usually ask some maintainers and other core members to keep an eye on the welcome channel and send a “welcome” message. And that seems to work mostly and kind of open the door to see if there’s another channel to direct them where they might find what they are looking for.

I think what @psingletary.com said about changing to a community server and doing some onboard listing what channels/sections are what, maybe even like a FAQ thing. Like, “Here because your PDS is blowing up? Maybe check #pds-operators” etc, and it’s a list that can be built over time. I think all of that would go a long way and help out some.

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Yes, that’s what I’m thinking. Very much a welcome channel and go from there as you suggest.

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and we can set up sets of channels that work for folks and they can add them by adding emoji, so they can opt into the parts of the server that are relevant for them.

It’s a helpful way to allow people to stay in one place and grow into different parts of the space over time.

It’s also more honest to our identity as a community that doesn’t believe there’s a hard line between user, builder, and developer.

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It would be helpful if there were explainers for discord notification management in onboarding. Ways to manage the channels people see too (can’t think of which groups I’m in that do this but there’s a few). I’ve heard from a few people in ATscience sphere that discord can be a lot when there’s many channels or people. These are features that would help a lot (personally I just auto mute everything lol).

And since I think the community will want an ATnative option in the future it makes most sense to work with the existing Touchers channel. Lots of information in there.

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