https://tfos.co logo
Join Discord
Powered by
Replacing twitter with discord
# forum
j
I've really been enjoying this discord server. The forum channel + chat channel is a nice combo, and the whole thing is nice and lightweight, as opposed to e.g. Discourse. I've also had far more discussion on this server than I ever had on Twitter! This is a topic I've thought about before and which is resurfacing: what might it look like if small community things like Discord were used as a wholesale replacement for social networks like twitter, mastodon etc. Or more concretely: what features might I add to Yakread to support that? Using this server as a prototype, while trying to do everything in a generic way, I could: 1. develop discord.tfos.co a bit more, or use linen.dev more, or do something so that the forum contents are are available publicly 2. Add some kind of metadata to my newsletter that links to the public syndication of the forum 3. Make Yakread check newsletters to see if they have that special metadata, and if so, mix posts from the forum into your social feed or something (i.e. the feed you get occasionally if you've connected to twitter or mastodon) the awkward thing using discord in tandem with the newsletter is that it's a separate thing, when "you signed up for the newsletter" is by itself a decent amount of signal that you might be interested in seeing posts from the forum. It's not that bad to just manually link to some of the discussions from the weekly newsletter. But it feels like there's room for a better experience. And maybe this yakread thing would provide that better experience! In effect, it'd be like "1) instead of a twitter account, make your own lightweight discord server, 2) instead of having people follow you on twitter, have them sign up for your newsletter, 3) anyone who signs up for your newsletter* will automatically "follow you" on discord as well" *with yakread at least, but other reader apps could/should theoretically do the same thing
Implementation-wise, I think I'd just need an rss feed of the discord server's contents, similar to https://tfos.co/p/rebuild-social-media/, don't necessarily need a human-viewable page with the forum contents. The RSS feed would need to have some metadata, like an invite link for the discord server, and the link for the original post that people can follow once they've joined the server.
So, if everyone used without-loss-of-generality Yakread and Discord in this way, I'm curious as to how that'd compare to twitter and mastodon and such. Subcommunities would be more clearly defined, each with its own moderation. You still get a single feed (in yakread) that would give the same kind of experience as scrolling twitter, but if you want to reply you have to click on the post and go to whatever community its hosted in, and be subject to its moderation. There'd be no retweet; harder for stuff to go viral => less competition for genuine discussion? overall I'm really liking the setup--I think it'd give the best of both worlds, with having my newsletter be the main thing that people sign up for if they want to follow me, but then also having tighter social-media-esque interaction here on discord, while keeping it all low-friction.
(Discord is clearly doing a good job of taking social media's place in terms of getting me to use it when I should be working/sleeping)
to phrase the benefits another way: I would personally love it if lots of other people made discord servers + newsletters in this way so I could follow them in yakread
on privateness/publicness: I guess the RSS feed doesn't even need to be totally public--it could be a secret feed that's only contained in the newsletter's metadata. (If we get fancy, it could even be protected by a per-subscriber token, but probably overkill imo).
sovereignty: since the "follow" is linked to yakread + the newsletter, I could theoretically switch from discord to some other platform, and anyone following me in yakread would still get updates (since I'd update the newsletter with the new feed)
Perhaps the more general principle is: email subscriptions can optionally come with RSS subscriptions, for reading apps that support it, and the RSS subscriptions can be used for stuff that doesn't fit in the email newsletter model
PreviousNext
Powered by