i’m new here so feel like my input doesn’t hold much weight and i’m sure people who have been in this community will feel different.
i’d agree that there can be a more “welcoming” presence from established community members/leaders/admins. i don’t think i’ve seen any responses come through the #welcome channel. fwiw i think Germ and npmx’s discords do a great job of engaging right away with people who join.
i think the social discord run by @psingletary.com breaks down the local “camps” really well but bc of the fracture i don’t think everyone knows about them. @teonbrooks.com there’s a “jfk” channel in there with some nyc people.
also, i think the social channel brings the fun with the wordle channel! i’ve been enjoying the connection with a handful of people playing wordle every day. even without talking much between each other we still come together to continue the streak.
all to say i don’t really have an opinion on a new discord server but i agree there should be a consolidation and rethink of how the current ones are used.
Consolidating Discord servers solves the problem temporarily. As the community grows, the same fragmentation will return. There is a third option beyond consolidation vs. fragmentation.
I run multiple Discord servers and use a shared channel called “Street” bridged by a bot across all of them. Each server stays independent, but cross-server conversation happens through this channel. Distributed servers, connected flow.
This mirrors the ATProto architecture itself: PDSes are distributed, the AppView connects them.
You’ve got as much as a voice as anyone! Even more so since we want opinions from people who haven’t gone through all the history!
Also: not a fracture, just a legacy of setting up the other discord for the conference last year. Personally, I’d much rather not have the giant list of airports but in fact have regionals request and name channels themselves.
That, and projects like a channel for “atmosphere-website” that I haven’t been comfortable making because a) I’m the newest admin on Touchers and b) really should be someone not-me doing more setup and admin.
@psingletary.com how do you feel about those comments, would you want to help build out touchers?
I’ll throw in with the “improve touchers” crowd. As far as I can tell it’s already got the largest, most active audience, so it seems the most natural core destination.
I’m also happy to help with admin/moderation on Discords. I currently help with or manage several large servers. Onboarding is usually my main focus. Despite its many flaws, Discord provides a lot of great tools for streamlining onboarding, including some magic for managing notifications out-of-the-gate.
@moja.blue mentioned cross-server conversation. Discord doesn’t provide anything native for that, but it does provide a sharing mechanism for announcements channels. It could be valuable to have a core announcements channel in Touchers for major announcements (i.e. api changes, spec changes, atproto.com blogs, etc) that other servers can subscribe to. This would allow us to have a single announcement space for these things with broader impact, shared across other community servers like npmx, germ, cartridge, etc.
TL;DR - Let’s see about improving touchers, I’m happy to help, there’s lots of useful Discord features that aren’t currently utilized by touchers.
Yes! There are definitely immediate improvements and things like an announce channel, and having a “network news” channel to follow other discords with are low hanging fruit.
Thanks for also putting your hand up here to help out.
I’m going to make a wiki page where we can put some top changes we’re suggesting and then bring this up with current admins.
Not saying that is the best option (as I’m not in the mentioned Discord channel and do know what happens there), but IF you’d decide on setting up something new instead of using/repurposing an existing and channel…
(and I’m kinda surprised it hasn’t come up yet in this long thread?)
… I would suggest us all throwing our weight behind an atproto native Discord alternative and make that our own.
We have the tech and smarts to do it, might as well do something with it #EatOurOwnDogfood
Which I interpreted as that starting something new / from scratch was on the table, but that was my bad then
In my experience as a community manager it is always infinitely better/easier to go where the community already is and just use that and live with the consequences. So yeah, definitely do that and don’t start something new if you don’t have to, that is where my “IF” came in
So I guess I should go sign up for that ATProto Touchers Discord then
