Anybody attempting to build a community on Discord?
Since my Indie Hack is a game I have gravitated towards Discord as tool for community building.
Has anybody else built a community there?
I'm assuming it would be very similar to building a community through something like Slack?
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I'm part of https://discord.gg/Ry2qDC it was a group for startup school by YC.
It was pretty active during the program and then died.
Hopefully looking to revive it for 2020 group.
Building communities are hard work, you need a constant flow of new people or some how engage older users.
Yep, community building is really a whole job unto itself.
Years ago I started hosting a bulletin board (phpBB based) for my brother. He wrote an alternative history story called "Shattered World" https://www.amazon.com/Shattered-World-Volumes-Bobby-Hardenbrook-ebook/dp/B008N5KP68 and needed a better way to interact with the fan base.
Since I was managing the board I ended up more or less becoming the community manager. I had no idea what I was signing up for! :-)
It was actually a pretty cool experience. We got enough traffic to make it interesting. We had a fairly hard core following of about 25 users that interacting a lot. Like daily. Another 100 that were regulars and several thousand lurkers.
It was an interesting insight into how communities work that I had no idea about. I was really surprise how passionate a lot of the users became. I had to step in on multiple occasions when disputes would arise.
In the end, bots starting finding the board and just destroyed it. It didn't really have the programming skills at the time to fight them off and eventually gave up.
In hind site though, man, that community was pure gold!!! Knowing what I know now and I'm learning here on Indie Hackers..... there is so much more that could have been done to grow that community! This was back in like, 2006 I think and obviously the tools available now are light years ahead of back then.
I built a tight community around a game I worked on a few years ago. Linked the discord from the game, steam page, itch, etc and of course anytime I talked about the game.
Stay active in the server, engage, and be welcoming. Works.
We're doing that right now for a startup headed to launch in February.
We had already collected email adresses in person at some events and through our landing page.
We announced in a newsletter that our Discord server was the best way to keep up to date with our progress and got ~150 people in a couple of days.
It's been a convenient way to communicate with our audience so far, but it still feels "one-way". We have a channel dedicated to Q&A and got some questions/activity, but the other channels are pretty much inactive for now.
Do you have any thoughts on how to drive more communication back from the audience?
One thing I was thinking, at some point, would you consider asking somebody from the list to be a moderator? I guess that wouldn't necessary drive feedback on its own but maybe it starts building towards it.
When I ran a fairly active BB awhile back, I asked a couple of the most active (and level headed :-) ) users if they would like to be moderators. It worked out great because I think it added more legitimacy to the idea that we were truly building a community. Plus, they were really active anyway and became better ambassadors for the site than me. Bonus! :-)
I am planning to start discord server as a membership group - paid access basically.
Still doing research.
I want to attempt to build a community on Discord for my B2B platform. I'm just getting started (have 2 members so far lol) but I'd be interested in any advice
I never really used slack (couple of times, during a couple of weeks) but I use Discord for about 3 years now because I play games and my friends play games. Ask me something if you want :)
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