You can find a community for almost anything, almost anywhere these days. As new tech launches and grows it enables new connections, but the variety of apps, features, and UIs has also led to fragmentation. Makers have taken notice.

Yesterday a community platform called Geneva launched itself to #1 Product of the Day. Geneva pulls together real-time chat, forum-style posts, audio, video, and live broadcasts into a single tool — many of the features that communities love and use regularly to connect with each other.

It’s hard to compress the use cases of Geneva into a short list (running clubs to retail teams, for example) but Li Jin, VC investor and tech thought leader, explained the implications of a platform designed explicitly to foster community.

“In a larger sense, Geneva is a new kind of digital infrastructure — the foundation upon which a new breed of cloud-native groups, clubs, communities, and even cities will be built over the coming decades.”

Geneva has been in a public beta and early adopters gave us a glimpse into favorite uses and benefits.

“I use Geneva for so many different things. My favorite home is for my fantasy basketball league, it has all the features that we could possibly need.” - Jason Fiedler

“It's like a friendly discord, or a less work-oriented slack.” - Emmett Shine

Geneva does have competition. You might recall that another product in this space launched a week ago and also received a warm reply from the Product Hunt community. Garnet is a tool centered around community and enables users to build their own custom video, audio, and text chat rooms while picking and choosing what features they want. Maker Carlos Diaz-Padrone explained:

“The idea is to be able to fit to the needs of any community online. Most [communities] are currently forcing Slack or Discord plus 5 other apps into this purpose. But that comes with a lot of friction because they weren’t really designed to be multi-purpose community tools.”

There are also a few older players in the game as well. One commenter noted they use Mighty Networks to build and manage their community. Mighty Network, and tools like it, are largely used to enable creators and brands to offer experiences to their communities. It's only a matter of time before we see stories about how creators and brands are leveraging tools like Garnet and Geneva for their businesses functions too.

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