What tool do you use for building a community?
Eivind Håverstad
34 replies
Have you built a community before, or are you making one now?
If you could go back in time and choose a communication tool for your community, what would it be?
If none of the alternatives below, please leave a comment.
Replies
Anna Kuzma@kuzmanna
The choice of the platform depends mostly on your industry, the size of the community, and your purposes.
We built a community specialized in collecting customer feature requests and other feedback using UseResponse
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Just starting on ours using Discord - makes sense for our Twitch Extension as it's gaming based. But we're not keen on the lack of features when compared to Slack for managing things!
@maxwellcdavis Ah. Right, that seems like a natural choice based on your segment. What kind of things does Slack have that Discord lack, in your opinion?
@eivindhaa A few things Discord has trouble with:
- Spam (lots of bots and troublesome accounts - DMs etc)
- Poor integrations with other products and services
- Poor notification system - difficult to cut through the noise of what is/isn't important
Slack:
- Good notifications
- I've not seen any spam really
- Excellent integrations and API opportunities
- More designed for business systems
BUT Discord is so easy, free and has great multimedia options!
@maxwellcdavis thanks for great insight! And while we're at it; do you have any experience with Tribe or Scenes ( ref comment from @jakub_piskor )?
Host a block party. Slow down, even just a little, and meet the neighbours!
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@aramis_thandeka Very nice opinion, totally agree. but hey when you are far away or isolated how do you do it?
I keep finding myself going back and forth between creating a community on slack/discord or creating a loosely distributed community/audience on Twitter.
I believe the answer is that it depends on your product. For something like a dev product where there would be a lot of integration questions, etc, I think slack/discord makes total sense. Wondering if it is appropriate even for a product like Thursday (thursday.social).
@nishith_shah I also think it in some ways depends on your product. In my case, we are planning to make a Norwegian hackathon community, which is why I have asked myself this question.
I believe making integrations on these platforms with Thursday is a great idea, @nishith_shah. You should consider looking more into that. 😃
We've recently made the switch from slack to discourse. Our reasoning was that although Slack is super widely used, it is not searchable from Google. Therefore, it does not help improve SEO ranking and conversations can be tricky to find after a while.
@taliambender I was not aware of that – which is a big differentiator in some cases. For me as well. Thanks for sharing this insight. 🙏
Recently, I asked the same question here. Unfortunately, I didn't get a relevant answer. I would be curious if someone here has experience with Tribe or Scenes.
@jakub_piskor hope this thread can give you some more relevance. Tribe and Scene are new to me. Anyone else who can answer Jakub here?
@eivindhaa We will see. I found Scenes very attractive but they don't show pricing. Which is something I don't like because I cannot say if it's worth to explore more deeply (It's more expensive than Slack, or less?). Also, is it good idea to build a community on platform that most people never heard of? Slack or Discord is familiar for most people..
A community platform is a virtual space where a group of people united in interests, goals, or other commonalities (including identity, purpose, or ideologies) come together to meet, connect, and build relationships with each other
greatpeople me login
It really depends a lot. Discord of course if pretty in right now for interactive communities. Telegram is also relevant sometimes, especially on crypto projects.
There are some platforms out there for more sophisticated and branded community platforms to build your online community. Examples are tribe.so, disciplemedia and more.
Based on our experiences and needs we decided to create our own platform and are currently in the development stage. You can check it out here: www.getwisdomcommunity.com
Facebook groups are also an option.
Even if i use Slack, my opinion is that discord is more powerfull to devlop or build a community
@fares_aktouf interesting. Can you please deliberate more on What makes Discord that powerful?
It depends on what type of community you are building. We use Slack to maximize productivity for communities that are task based and Discord for casual stuff
Bear in mind Slack and Discord are just two tools of many tools that are used to build community. It's very restrictive to view these tools as the only thing that builds community.
Community can happen wherever there are conversations.
From that perspective there's normally a 'community tech stack', here's mine:
- Ghost for blog + email (I used Revue until recently)
- Discord for chat + audio type events
- Twitter for Twitter Spaces
- Discourse for forum
- Luma for events (though am tempted by Ticket Tailor)
- Butter for events
- Notion for curation and sharing of some content
@rosiesherry I feel bad for my late response here, sorry. Thanks for filling in the blanks regarding tools and categorizing them as you've done. This is an excellent list for me as a community builder newbie, and I guess it will be that for many others. About the Revue transition, what tool for newsletters do you use now? Again, thanks!
@rosiesherry Right, now I understand. Again, thanks. Btw, loved your talk with Michelle in her podcast Software Social.
