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Discussion on: Dev.to Community Discord

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avalander profile image
Avalander

I recall that this has been brought up in the past and at that point the core team decided against it to avoid fragmenting the community. If people are hanging out on discord chances are that they will become less active on this site, which means fewer content is generated. And, as nice as it is to chat on discord, discord doesn't have the same capacity to generate content than dev.to.

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dtinth profile image
Thai Pangsakulyanont

Really good point here. Adopting a communication tool always poses a chance of fragmenting the community. We can avoid that by not adopting it, but I also believe other solutions exist, such as more integration. I have done a lot of integration work with Slack and Discord in other events and projects, so may I offer some perspective here.

If people are hanging out on discord chances are that they will become less active on this site, which means fewer content is generated. And, as nice as it is to chat on discord, discord doesn't have the same capacity to generate content than dev.to.

In the olden days, many open source projects have an IRC channel. In many of them, a bot records all messages and put them in an IRC archive. In a similar way, we might create a bot on Discord that publishes all messages to the site. Contents on Discord therefore become contents on the site itself. Publicly searchable and permalinkable.

To ensure accountability of the contents posted, as well as to make content moderation simpler, and also to prevent userbase fragmentation, we might disallow server members from posting any message until they link their Discord account with their DEV account. After which, a server bot can assign a role to the linked Discord user, granting them permission to post messages.


However, I wrote the above before I saw more context here:

From what I see, even more concerns other than this exist.