Things have been moving pretty fast between travel, amazing conferences, Reclaim awesomeness, etc., that I’m bound to fall behind or even miss a few things on the old bava.blog. But one video I wanted to post was a conversation Lauren and I had about building out Reclaim Hosting’s Discord server. It was the first installment of our 3-part flex-course focused on “Building Community with Discord.” This episode aired on Tuesday, April 5th, and the flex-course is finishing up tomorrow with the final installment, “The Future of Discord at Reclaim,” which airs at 12 Pm ET.
Lauren did all the heavy lifting on building the various iterations of our Discord servers, and in this session she walks-through her work and even shares a template for others to build off. My role is simply to narrate some of Reclaim’s history with Discord, as well as add some color commentary. The bits that are fun in terms of that history is how the OERxDomains21 conferences experience, which used Discord as its backbone, was inspired by various influences such as Cloudflare.tv, exptv.org, and the Digital Ocean Deploy conference in 2020. These three examples helped us frame what we wanted for OERxDomains21, which was also the moment where we realized Discord will be crucial for just about everything we wanted to do for that conference when it came to creating a sense of community.
I’m pretty surprised at the use of Discord, since there are some alternatives out there that are more open (but maybe don’t have the features?).
I’m getting ready to try out a https://zulip.com/ installation myself.
This past February I set up a Discord server for a conference and I was very impressed with its features, but I still didn’t like the lock in. 🙂
We talk a bit about that, and we had considered Mattermost and RocketChat, but the fact Discord was quite easy to run and fairly popular meant we could simplify certain things. I do love the idea of running a fully open source alternative, but some times the reliability of tried and true infrastructure like YouTube and Discord makes experimenting for a mission critical conference event a bit tricky