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16 Comments

What tools would you use to start building a small community?

I posed this question to Twitter and thought it would be useful to summarise the tools mentioned here.

  • Slack
  • Commsor
  • Eventbrite
  • Telegram
  • Discord
  • Facebook Groups
  • Mighty Networks
  • Email (wasn't mentioned in the Tweets, but is valid tool to use)

What other suggestions would you add?

  1. 7

    It depends entirely on the type of community and what my long-term plans were. But if I wanted to start small, I'd likely start with some sort of mobile chat-based group, e.g. WhatsApp. I'm not that big a fan of Slack, as people seem to lose track of their groups when they get new computers, or get signed out of Slack, or have to reinstall it.

    I'd likely eventually try to transition it to the web. I've got a bunch of experience building a custom forum, and it only took a week to get the MVP for the IH forum off the ground back in September 2017, so rather than Discourse/etc I'd just build my own forum once the group started getting too big.

    The one thing I'd do differently is try to make the forum smaller at first. Instead of a giant list of posts that was mostly empty and unchanging, I'd probably just choose one discussion to feature each day, until the volume was high enough that I could feature a few more, etc.

  2. 3

    For new community builders, I'd recommend checking out:

  3. 3
  4. 2

    What other suggestions would you add?

    Reddit

  5. 1

    https://tribe.so/ seem interesting, with a generous free tier
    It is also designed to be embedded in your app.
    Didn't use it myself yet, but planning to give it a try

  6. 1

    https://tribe.so/ seem interesting, with a generous free tier
    It is also designed to be embedded in your app.
    Didn't use it myself yet, but planning to give it a try

  7. 1

    Hittly is a lite forum software for building engaging communities without all the annoying bloat. Give it a try !

  8. 1

    Thinking about this for thegoodstartup.com because I want to bring together all the people who want to do more meaningful things for the world, but do y'all have any idea what point I should start doing that? I don't want to make a group and only have less than 100 people join it because I'm scared of low engagement

  9. 1

    Have you seen gitter? https://gitter.im/explore/tags/?action=explore&source=homepage I haven't used it personally but I've lurked and gotten answers from there before :)

  10. 1

    https://joinmastodon.org/ may be helpful. Ive never set it up myself but heard good things

  11. 1

    People's Voicemail is a plug and play open forum that works for both online and offline communities. It adds the context of actual voice, like intonation, cadence, volume etc, things that are often lost when communicating through text only.

  12. 1

    There is a new community called WebWide that I’ve been enjoying lately. It’s a forum that uses XenForo. I’m really impressed with the forum software and would love to do something similar in the future. It kind of feels like a throwback to the internet of 15 years ago before everything centralized into Facebook etc.

  13. 1

    I would also recommend making a reddit sub!

    I tested this over in this thread... https://www.indiehackers.com/post/quick-results-from-creating-a-reddit-group-7bdfb72fe9

  14. 1

    LinkedIn Groups might be helpful depending on your community. MeetUp seems less active than it once was, but still relevant.

  15. 1

    I prefer to use Discourse or Spectrum because it gives context to discussions and keeps community more organized. But these tools work when there are atleast 500 users readily available to signup.

  16. 1

    nodebb.org is also great! Twitter itself too?

  17. 1

    This comment was deleted 7 months ago.

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