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

[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.