As you might imagine, I get requests for more information on how to build community. And right after that, on which platform to build if building online.
Here’s a good overview from CMX. Also, if you’re into community building, you should consume CMX’s blog and podcast–at least cherry-pick through their stuff.
One that someone mentioned yesterday was gather.town. I haven’t investigated it, but I’m told it’s pretty neat.
I am excited to read this and see the discussion from our community.
I only quickly skimmed it. Discourse (the platform this community is built on,) is mentioned in a positive light.
One tool that I would like to see as part of this community—I mean the general concept, “a community of people”—is a way for people to interact in real time. When they want. Only if they want. I don’t like, literally, all of the real-time interaction platforms, including Discord. (And we have a Discord server, see Community Discord server. It’s an experiment, which I simply haven’t yet gotten around to taking down.)
But I was excited to see that Discourse is experimenting with having some built-in chat functionality. Before everyone panics… their idea is to make an optional thing, so if you (some specific members here) want to chat, you would be able to do so without having to leave the Discourse platform.
If you’ve not yet nodded off, here’s the conversation over on Meta: Introducing Discourse Chat (PRE-ALPHA) - announcements - Discourse Meta Their timeline is to be experimenting with it on the Meta site “late December or early January”. So it’s going to be a while, if ever, that it’s an actual thing that we might experiment with here.
FYI, I just got around to removing the Discord server experiment. 