Slack or Discord for building a curated, online community? | Hacker News Reader

Slack or Discord for building a curated, online community?

1 pointactfrench8 comments

Hi hive, I'm the founder of a startup that's building a movement around a new kind of education where families design their child's education through custom classes, tutors, social experiences as a replacement ot traditional school (homeschooling 2.0)

I'm building a community of parents to share resources, ideas, sharing classes/teachers, possibly even for nanny share.

I'm trying to decide whether to use slack or discord and would love feedback from other founders on which has worked better for them and why...and possibly if there's another great alternative I'm not thinking of.

Thanks!

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Neither, you exclude a whole bunch of people who don't want to be domesticated, so offer everything.

I’m not sure I understand . What do you mean by domesticated ? Wouldn’t it create mass confusion to have multiple communication channels. I’m part of an orb that has slack and discord and I find it really annoying having to check both

Discord is an unfortunately common platform that requires people to leave whatever they already use (or even just forums), it excludes a while bunch of people.

The real thing is it's a minimum effort choice that means people need to sign up to yet something else to engage.

Yes! That's a really fantastic point. An advisor of mine who runs an online community said he chose slack because that's what most of his people were using already. The only problem is what parents seem to use most is Facebook/Meta and I definitely don't want to use that. Lol

its certainly a problem with all the fragmentation, but in general discord users will use something else whereas others will likely not use discord (also means content is never indexed meaning people can't easily stumble upon answers/questions etc) as it's essentially a walled garden...

Edit: a good example is the rust project who insist on using a zulip walled garden for development which excludes a whole bunch of people and makes finding answers to already solved problems impossible as obviously it's never indexed by search engines etc - quite a different field of course but the general principle still applies

Why just those two options? There are, of course, others...

Would love to hear your thoughts on others to try. Thank you !

Spend a lot of time in Mattermost. It's open source. Somewhat like a Slack clone with a few differences.

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