Hi all! I wanted to share the progress I've been making putting together a very simple community platform.
My background is offline/online (mostly online these days!) communities, I've been building/working with a few for about 7 years now - thisiscodebase.com is the big one. We've been through a bunch of community platforms over the years - right now we primarily use Slack + Mighty Networks, alongside more one-way communication tools.
I like MN, but I've had a lot of feedback from our community that they really dislike the interface - in fact they much preferred using Google Groups which we used for ~5 years before. I tried to get to the bottom of why, and it feels like there's two things:
So I did what I think many of you might do, and built my own tool. It's primarily built for smaller communities like ours (in the hundreds, not thousands) and is effectively a discussion, events, profiles, and the ability to create smaller, niche groups. I wanted our community to be able to see everything that is going on within one screen, and get relevant info direct to their inboxes.
Still very much in beta - I'd love any feedback. If you want to join a dummy community, you can sign up here https://getsets.net/join/loftcoworking, and if you send me any feedback I've got a handful 50% off for life vouchers I can send you.
Edit: I should add, you'll need to register via a real email address - there's an approval system for each Set to help community managers make sure the right people are joining, and you get your confirmation to your inbox.
Thank you!
Oli
I'm really liking the minimalistic look of the platform. Is there a writeup on the build of it? How long did it take to get the platform to beta? Well done @oliphant
Thank you! The design definitely still needs a bunch of work, but I have a designer waiting for the first bit of revenue to bring in and smarten it up.
I haven't done a write up, but I started in November. I have a full time job so it was mostly evenings and weekends, and a bit of a burst of activity over Christmas. I built it in the NoCode tool Bubble, and am going to put out a more general my-experience-of-nocode-mvps blog post in the next few days.
I really like the simplicity of this. It looks very good.
Simple is what I'm going for, so thanks!
Looks interesting!
Just created AnimationCPU community
https://getsets.net/set/animationcpu
Improve color theme and fonts, thanks :)
Excellent, thank you! I think I want to keep it mostly black and white, but I think I might add a few colours for people to pick the highlight colour from (kind of like Twitter I suppose).
Yeah, dark and light mode looks good :)
looks so good! very cool.
Thanks :D
I think it's great. I'm going to spend some time playing around with it! Just signed up and created a set (cybersecuritycareers). Great work!
Nice! Let me know if you have any questions :)
Hey there! Congratulation on making simple. If there's anything I've learned building https://midnight.pub, it's that a community is all about the people within it. The tool, as fancy as they are, are secondary.
Cheers!
Yes! I love it - super simple, can see what's going on in a few seconds.
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Hey, absolutely - send me an email! Happy to chat.