Community-Building (and a warning about choosing Discord for online communities)

[thebiballerina]

Here are some notes I have on community-building. I am coming at this from the perspective of someone who has started online communities, moderated additional communities, and lead both new and established in-person community organizations. I hope someone finds this helpful!

Clarifying The Term "Community"

When I refer to "a community" in this sense, I am referring to a specific space that attracts people around a common interest. The interest doesn't have to be what we may traditionally think of as an interest. For example, "living in the same neighborhood and wanting it not to be terrible," can be an interest. I'll probably lean slightly more towards talking about online communities here, because that is where we are currently talking, but most of this applies or can be altered to fit offline community dynamics.

Don't "Reinvent the Wheel"

One thing I think is really important in community-building is to not put too much effort into figuring out things which other communities have most certainly figured out before you. I think that is a huge mistake many new community leaders make. Use your resources!

For example, if your community is a Discord server, Discord itself has an entire section of their website devoted to helping you learn how to moderate better, and that's outside of their resources on the technical aspects. If your community is an activist community, check your local library resources, talk to people at research institutions who study these types of movements, and talk to activists in related areas on how they maintain their organizations. If you are starting or taking over leadership of a school extracurricular club, your school may have resources on how to make it better. My university has an entire department that will help with that, including with specific scenarios such as leadership transfers, declining membership, etc.

If you plan to start a local organization, look into whether you may be better served starting a branch of a regional, national, or international organization. Or perhaps you could work with a coalition of similar organizations. If that possibility exists, you already have framework and resources to start the organization, and there are likely people whose job role specifically includes helping people like you succeed.

The point is: Whatever you want to do, people have done this before. People naturally assemble in communities; they have done it for thousands of years, and for at least the past few centuries, they have often kept records while they have done so. Take advantage of that!

Also, don't just stick to frameworks and tools you know. Look into your options. For example, I see a lot of Discord servers that pop up these days for communities that I'm not sure are best served by Discord servers. I will elaborate on these cases under the cut.

Potential Problems with Discord for Online Communities

Note that I do not mean this as a criticism of any communities, creators, moderators, or users. I mean this as an observation and warning regarding potential community dynamics, and nothing more.

To be clear, I love using Discord, and I love that it is becoming more popular. I moderate multiple Discord servers, so I am not saying this because I have something against Discord. But I have seen a few Discord servers, especially very large ones, that I think would have been better off as forums, Dreamwidth communities, or using some other service or site. Or, perhaps, they would have been better off using Discord for only some community functions, and also having other "homes" online. Allow me to elaborate, in general terms, on why many large or fast-growing communities are not best served by Discord, at least not in their entirety.

Why communities, especially large ones, may encounter issues as Discord servers:

• It is really difficult to moderate a server with many people, especially one that grows quickly and requires many channels to stay organized. If the creator has a predetermined moderator team on hand, this can lead to a moderator team without diverse perspectives and opinions, as well as troubling dynamics when the original mod team is a group of friends or a segment of a different community. If the creator does not have a predetermined moderator team on hand, it takes time for community members to become involved and trusted enough to be responsibly chosen as moderators, and it takes time for responsible community members to develop enough trust and attachment in the community that they want to moderate in the first place. Therefore, a server which grows extremely quickly will have trouble finding a sufficient number of moderators in a timely manner.
• While a synchronous conversation style (i.e. channels with one long continuous chain of messages) can work well for smaller communities, it's not great for many larger communities which often segment into sub-communities. Some of this is mitigated by Discord's newer features, which include replies, threads, and the forum feature (which is only available in community servers at the moment). But it is still Discord's main method of communication, as opposed to other services which may operate on a more asynchronous style of communication.
• If the community is big, it is often based on a somewhat well-known topic (I use "well-known" in a relative sense), and invite links may be posted publicly. The server might also be listed on Discord's community pages if it wishes to make use of the functions of community servers (which include the forum feature at this point in time). Therefore, this creates a community which essentially anyone can join (at least for some period of time), but the conversations themselves are not public. This leads to valuable information and discussions on a popular topic being kept in a closed space, when they could be helpful if they were publicly posted. Also, this means new members may have difficulty understanding what they are getting into when they join. Finally, this contributes to issues regarding accountability and safety.

The Accountability and Safety Issue

A large Discord community might:

• be too large and too busy to moderate properly,
• be still growing, faster than they could possibly responsibly onboard moderators,
• contain many sub-interests, so people may frequently take conversations to direct messages or their own servers, then moving the conversations out of the original moderators' purview entirely,
• not be viewable to the outside world,
• not have a built in method to keep users updated on the results of harassment and abuse decisions,
• not have a built-in record-keeping system for messages deleted/edited by original senders or deleted by moderators, and many third-party bots which perform these functions only do so for moderators, not users who submit harassment reports.

Well, you may start to see how that is dangerous, and vulnerable to abuse. So, keep these issues in mind when you consider what service will be the best home for a community you wish to start or grow.

I hope you found this information interesting or helpful! If there is interest, I can work on assembling a list of resources for community-building. Let me know in the comments!

Comments

[vriddy]

Oh, that was super interesting, thank you for sharing!! I hope you don't mind if I link to this in my journal, too? :)

[thebiballerina]

You're welcome! And go for it! Feel free to link my entries anytime. Most of them are resources made to be shared anyway.

[cesy]

A handy summary, thank you.

Here from vriddy's link

[thebiballerina]

You're welcome! Thank you for the comment!

[topaz_eyes]

(Dropping in from my Network.)

I'm so glad I found your post. I can confirm that all your criticisms about Discord as a fandom platform are fully valid. I left a fandom Discord server recently for precisely the issues you point out here.

It's a real problem for fandom when Discord becomes the only truly active fandom site. Because Discord operates in a closed space and conversations are not public, that effectively excludes people. May I also point out that not everyone may be able to use Discord for access reasons.

I would go so far to say that if the aim is to build a fully inclusive, public fandom community, it may be best to avoid Discord entirely. Public-facing forums, Dreamwidth comms, or other platforms would be more inclusive instead. (Reddit surprisingly is not bad for fandom discussion.)

[thebiballerina]

Thank you! You make some excellent points, especially about access.

I appreciate that Discord gave me an opportunity to integrate into fandoms in a way I would not have otherwise, but I can recognize it's now being used a little too much for things it just isn't ideal for. I'm personally of the opinion that fandom Discords work best when they are small, focused groups that have a specific goal or something in common besides the fandom, and that a Discord server definitely should not be the entry-point for a fandom community.

I haven't delved much into using Reddit, but I could see how the functionality might lend itself to fandom discussion. I would also love to see more forums, and maybe more efforts to make forums easier to use for newbies. I know some people have a knee-jerk reaction of avoiding forums because the UI feels outdated to them, and while I don't agree, I think it's something to consider as to why Discord in particular has gained so much popularity: the more "modern" look and feel.

Also, as a somewhat paranoid tech fandom person, I also favor sites which are run by fans and give users some level of control, which is probably why I've taken to Dreamwidth more than any other site I've tried in recent years.

[mekare]

Here via rekishi sharing the link. I only joined Discord a couple of years ago (for a Big Bang challenge) and I appreciated having real-time support during that challenge.

But since then, I have also joined two fandom Discords with many channels and lots of activity and see all the points coming up you mentioned. It grieves me to see excellent meta discussions just vanish into the other end of a channel, never to be seen again…

[thebiballerina]

Yes, exactly. Discord is great for real-time conversations, so I think the use of it for a challenge makes lots of sense! It's the longer-term stuff that I don't think always suits the format best.

[i_wish_to_remain_nameless]

I like discord but I agree that large servers are hard to use because of how fast discussion moves in them, and a lot of communities would be better off posting their stuff somewhere more accessible to the public.

[thebiballerina]

Yes, fast discussion is a big issue. Especially if you are someone who may not be as active on social media, or who can't maintain a consistent level of activity. It's a lot harder to feel part of the community then, and I think lots of people who want to participate get left behind.

here from <user name=fictional_fans>

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks for this analysis. Many online SF con designate Discord as a social space.

Discord requires excellent short-term memory and good vision, both missing in my standard installation.

Several technical forums I visit use the open source Discourse software -- it's exceptionally flexible. One can participate solely by email as well as the web. Lots of moderation tools.

Re: here from <user name=fictional_fans>

[thebiballerina]

You're welcome! Yes, I do notice that memory can be an issue when using Discord.

Thank you for linking that software; it looks interesting!