Running a Discord Community

Kyougu

After running a very successful meetup group for 14 years I finally decided that I would end it this year. I feel burned out/underappreciated and rather go out while I still mostly enjoy it.

We have built a community though and I know people do appreciate it as a way to meet people/do activities, so I wanted to find a way to keep that alive while still being more hands off (Right now I organize and attend 100% of the events).

I was thinking Discord? Set up a channel, then have different rooms for types of activities. Let people post things/outings themselves ("Thinking about happy hour this week!") kind of thing while I just moderate it and post more involves outings when I feel like it.

Does that all sound doable? Any tips? I'm only vaguely familiar with Discord (a friend mentioned bots?) so any advice on running a community would be appreciated!

Reznik

Carl Bot is a very useful bot, Dyno as well, they have some feature overlap but can be set up to give people roles/respond to commands/some automod functions, etc.

Roles are useful for sorting people. You can have channel permissions related to roles, so eg. you need the kayaking role to see the kayaking channel or whatever. There's a lot of ways to set this up depending on your community.

You're gonna wanna disable notifications for all messages and at least limit it to @ everyone pings (or just eliminate completely)

Discord has an events feature that can be used for scheduling too

Jasconius

my advice is to keep your list of channels small relative to the number of active people

if you make a giant maze of channels then people will either get fatigued by it or they will nest in random channels and never go anywhere else

i think a ratio of 10 people per channel is close to ideal

carl bot mostly works, is free, non-invasive, etc