Fostering a Discord Community
I like owning and managing Discord communities. I enjoy bringing people together and making a hub for people to chat. I’ve moderated a few Discord servers before, and even owned one myself with 500 members.
Even though in real life I am very introverted and not that social, in the online world I kinda like talking to people (with similar interests of course) which is why I enjoy managing servers, since staff members would be the ones with most interaction with the community at large.
So my server with 500 members. I’ve seen servers at ~4k members which weren’t as active as my previous server. That place basically never died, which made it hard to moderate since I actually sleep and was basically the only staff. It was a good place, I still have one of the members as a Discord friend (I should really talk to them again…).
What happened was kinda weird and I don’t remember the details (or cared to) but as the server expanded, it got more inactive, I opened staff applications and interacted less. I don’t really remember why I did this besides school, but I still could’ve been there after a school day was finished. But a part of the active members of the server started to dislike me a bit, created their own server and separated from the community. At that point I didn’t really want to manage it anymore, so I just passed ownership to someone who I gave an admin position. That was a dumb decision since a couple days later the server was just gone. Out of existence, deleted. Community that I put a sum of effort into pretty much disappeared.
Me transferring ownership wasn’t for the point of not wanting to associate with that place anymore, I just didn’t want the “owner” position anymore. I remember sending a message to that admin as to why they deleted it but don’t remember what they said or any conversation. So of the members that created their server, the one I had added as a friend gave an invite and I talked to the others.
And that’s all I remember about that story of my server owner life. Lasted a couple months. I always tried to make an active community after that with the same feel as the original but it was never there, I couldn’t even grow it to past 50 members. Between that, I also had a separate server for announcing personal project news and a side chat place (it was dead). At the start of 2021, I started being more active on GitHub. I worked on my Stardew Valley mod manager, some Node.js packages and other things. In between that, I decided to migrate my mini “community” and announcement Discord to a newer different place, since I thought that making a new server and doing a migration would be easier than changing around my old server. The intention would be that the server would be a better community place to finally have a chat place decent chat place. Unfortunately, It was yet again a dead place with once in a while messages. I didn’t really mind it that much though, since I was active in the r/unixporn Discord server. In mid-March, I started development on Hilbish. My biggest project, and my longest living one (more than 2 months!). Since it has semi-frequent version releases, I revamped my server a bit and added specific news and software update ping roles.
I basically got burnt out around July and stopped making commits on Hilbish until the middle of September. That was when I decided to make yet another revamp to my Discord server to make it a bit better for a generalized community server. This server right now is the cloud community. With only 26 people while I’m writing, it’s still a decently active community place even at that low member count.
I realized that to have a healthy or active community server, you don’t need to have 20,000+ members. You just need a few frequently chatting people. I made a hoisted role for active people, started saying more myself in there and put an advert in my Discord bio. That’s how I got the 26 members, from about 10.