Theme-ui: Community Discord?

[Sonicrida]

Describe the solution you'd like
I briefly mentioned the idea of a theme-ui discord to @KyleAMathews and he suggested that ask here to see if I could help in setting one up! I think it would be a great idea to help form a community around the project. I've setup a few programming discords in the past and also help to moderate the Reactiflux discord. I would love to help get one setup if you all feel as though this is a good idea!

Additional context
I think that discords are great supplementary tools for open source projects. I've seen it being extra helpful with Gatsby and I'm sure that Theme-UI could benefit from the same.

[jxnblk]

I've never used Discord myself. If you'd like to set one up and add a link in the readme, we could give it a shot

[Sonicrida]

Awesome! I'll set it up over the next few days 👍

[mrmartineau]

Don't want to step on any toes, but Spectrum might be a better option. It has SEO by default where Discord doesn't. I know the two services serve different purposes, but as a channel for support and sharing, in my opinion, it is better than discord.

[Sonicrida]

That's a fair point to bring up. The main reason I shy away from spectrum is that I've seen way too many open source communities migrate from things like slack and discord to have their traffic and discussion go way down and sometimes die out. A few seem to thrive but I have a hard time recommending the platform because of this. I don't really understand why this happens but I've heard a fair bit of UX complaints. I think the lack of real time nature results in less discussion happening. Dedicated apps like Discord or slack have more control over customizing the user experience as well.

Based on my experiences helping to run Reactiflux and being apart of a few of the other open source communities on Slack and Discord like the ones listed here, https://discordapp.com/open-source I think that any loss of SEO is worth the amount of help and overall learning, interaction, and community building that is gained by using Discord.

[CanRau]

Thought about spectrum, too. Yet it feels kinda less stable, it always flickers after the first seconds, I just started reading, then everything disappears for a sec just to return as it looked before^^ that's kinda annoying 😅
SEO discoverability sounds great though, Discord and Slack have search functions yet I like to be able to just search Google and know it'll search the chat as well..
Just some thoughts 😉 I'm joining whatever will be used ❤️

[dcastil]

Now that GitHub Discussions are in beta, how about trying that? That would fit right in.

I didn’t find a marketing page for the feature, but Next.js is using it already: https://github.com/zeit/next.js/discussions

Edit: It will be available "soon": https://github.blog/2020-05-06-new-from-satellite-2020-github-codespaces-github-discussions-securing-code-in-private-repositories-and-more/#discussions

[jxnblk]

Thanks @dcastil! I think the plan now is to use GH discussions when that's available

[lachlanjc]

We’re using GitHub Discussions now, is there still a need for a Discord? Personally I much prefer Discussions since they’re web searchable/linkable/integrated with Issues/the code.

[jxnblk]

Yup! Going to close this out since Discussions are enabled now, thanks!