I am looking to start my own community. Free for now, but planning on charging for access at some point.
Would Slack or Discord be better suited for this?
In my research I found sites like Launchpass that looks like it can take care of the charging part.
Also looked into other platforms like Mighty Network, but it seems a little heavy for now.
Edit: went with Discord https://discord.gg/kPEgvGf
I'm on the discord bus too right now. not sure if it's just cos i'm bored of slack but ... feels more alive over there. and they're on a huge growth spurt.
Slack bot API still has the edge though with buttons/ UI kit.
Have some friends made a thread feature bot for discord, that's the main UI feature missing.
and the channels "default all shown", i think i prefer slack "default hidden"
voice and screen sharing are a huge differentiator tho
Discord seems on a tear right now. It's MySpace all over again with animated GIFs!
haha yeah my plan is to move off of Discord if there are signs of a strong community, and build it into a standalone one.
until then, the current UX is good enough
I checked out your links it seems that you're doing some stuff for language learning in which case discord seems like a much better bet because of all the voice channels. Also there is a number of bots for language related stuff, like kotoba
https://github.com/mistval/kotoba
I built a community when i was learning japanese way back in the day. http://jgram.org and i had wanted to move that all to a bot one day
ohh that's cool, thanks for sharing! :)
the community I started is somewhat unrelated to my other sites haha we mostly do a daily standup to share progress, to keep each other accountable
https://discord.gg/kPEgvGf
I actually asked a very similar question here recently. You might find this thread useful: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/discord-vs-slack-vs-discourse-where-do-you-build-your-community-6e98ba658e
Thanks! That is helpful :)
The only thing discord is missing is threads. In my opinion it is much more usable than Slack. If a community is on slack, I am very unlikely to use it.
I'm a developer and a gamer though so I lean towards discord heavily. I think just ask yourself where would your average member most likely already be ? Slack or Discord ?
We also found lack of threats to be a big problem when moving a community from Slack to Discord so someone here is building out a threads bot using emoji reactions
https://github.com/EscapeRoomsCommunity/escape_roomba/pull/7
I'm trying slack for xoxo.vc. I use slack for my day job and it's great. But for group chats, I'm not sure if I'll stay on it long term. We put 5-10 people in a single channel (for the 30 day bootcamp) and have shared general channels.
I loved Slack but I think they're going to be squeezed between teams for bigcos and then all of the hipster open source projects switching to Discord for easy Screen Sharing and shared login / features, and basically a much more generous free plan. we'll see...
what did you decide?
discord, it was easier to set up. so far, so good
I have been through a similar struggle. Penned down my thoughts on Slack v/s Discord for building a learning community here : https://medium.com/novasemita/online-learning-communities-slack-v-s-discord-9f290a69f51a
I wonder why Twist is on nobodies radar. It‘s a Slack alternative that fixes the broken parts. Threads are in the center of each conversation. It helps you to keep context and focus on the conversation. Something I really appreciate.
Good question @jhlyeung. I recently made a post about community tools that you might find helpful Here. You might find it helpful.
Telegram.org. They got more of a professional appearance and very clean UI compared to Discord and a bigger userbase than Slack. You can create public/private groups, bots, and announcement / blog channels.
Hey, @jhlyeung I am working on habitate.io, you can test our product new UI at community.habitate.io. Would love to join hands with you and build a community for you, let me know what you think. Thanks.
@jhlyeung - outside of Discord, have you looked at:
Xenforo
Peerboard
Tribe.so
Vanilla Forums