ThreeFold Discord Channel?

#1

Hi all, we’ve long considered the idea of a Discord Channel but given the number of platforms already maintained by the ThreeFold Foundation and our efforts to grow those channels, the idea hasn’t gotten enough momentum to move forward.

Someone asked about it on Twitter today and I thought it would be a good idea to instead pose the question to the community: should we create a Discord Channel?

This is really a question of supply and demand. “Supply” being do we have enough resources to maintain a healthy and quality Discord channel, and “demand” being is there enough reason to have a Discord channel to begin with?

This person who asked the question on Twitter also offered their support as a moderator, so one idea from the standpoint of “supply” is to get the community involved in maintaining the channel. But what about the growth of the channel?

I think a prerequisite to creating a Discord channel would be to have enough buy-in from the community to support or even lead these efforts. Discord could become a truly community-led platform for the ThreeFold project.

As for “demand,” well we know that there are more than enough people using Discord that would be interested in ThreeFold. But another question of demand is, would creating a Discord channel just be duplicating the efforts we already have on Telegram and on our forum, as examples.

Anyway, I’m curious to hear your thoughts. Let’s make this decision together. :pray:

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ThreeFold Weekly! February 13th Edition (Volume Six)
#2

@gosam it is a great discussion to start. Discord is definitely a central tool in web3, especially when it comes to running a DAO as there are now many plug-ins that have been built-in (mostly connected to the Ethereum network).

However, the fact that it isn’t open-source is also an issue. Would be good to know if the community believes we need Discord today and if we could have a roadmap to eventually in the future move to an open-source alternative like Mattermost or Revolt.

Or should we just start on the open-source alternatives from day-1?

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#3

Firstly my understanding is that Discord has more impact in the US? Personally, I would not sign up for another communication account. Another source of becoming intercepted. Fully agree on the bandwidth of the TF staff: what would be the incremental reach when taking Telegram and Twitter into consideration. Thirdly, it needs to be clarified if this would be a tool for the TF Foundation or for TF Tech.
Question: the person who volunteered to moderate a D. channel-would he do it free of charge or ask us to insert small coins ;-)?
What would you understand of ‘community lead’: This channel would not officially represent Threefold F’s and Threefold T’s opinion, rather than being an entirely independent communication vehicle operated by legally and financially independent individuals?

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#4

Great point on open-source. Actually we have already gotten started on MatterMost here: https://news.freeflow.life/ but no traction / usage yet. We haven’t put much attention there for reasons stated in the post. The reason to go to Discord would be because the “base” is already there whereas with MatterMost we need to pull people in. But your post definitely has me personally leaning towards NO.

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#5

Thanks Otto for your feedback. :pray:

  1. I would imagine it to be a tool for the Foundation.
  2. Not sure, I didn’t ask. :laughing: But it sounded like they wanted to do it purely out of support.
  3. Yes I think it would have to have language as you are eluding to. ThreeFold is a decentralized project after all so ultimately in the end, the community can do as they please.
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#6

Hmm maybe I speak for me but didn’t made good experiences with discord especially in the crypto scene.

As it’s the most used chat after telegram in this scene, it is full of scammers. They just w8 that TF makes a discord :wink:

Further I don’t like it personally cause it’s not user friendly and completely overloaded of useless colorful stuff you don’t need :smiley: but that’s my opinion.

Maybe there is something better out there where you can have channels?

Slack for example I prefer.

But the best I think would be a self made decentralized chat app, maybe built-in in threefold-connect where all twins can chat. Maybe it’s a thing for free flow pages which maybe gets more attention with more chat and collab features?

I would love it if in the future this thing would be self hostable on grid for private usage like jabra protocol stuff or similar. Opensource today.

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#7

Thats exactly what we should be aiming for - maybe something to put a grant on for someone to take it forward? :thinking:

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#8

I‘m also very active in the Helium project. They have a discord. It’s really a great way for the community to interact and Cluster the topics into different channels. The moderators are community based. Me and some friends already use discord for Threefold topics and it’s super nice.

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#9

every single web3 project that I follow except ThreeFold has a Discord. As a result, when I open Discord, all my interests, except one, are in the same place. Previous experiences with mattermost were so underwhelming, it kept breaking, participants couldn’t see all the channels etc.

Having one or two Telegram channels for ALL ThreeFold threads (which means that anything gets buried almost instantly and it’s impossible to keep track of a conversation on one topic) and then myriad threaded replies under Forum discussion topics (where you have no idea if anyone will ever see them), and the chat function on the site, and posting straight to Github, and DMs on Telegram…it has the effect (by design) of sharding the conversation.

There is no single place where a new person can come along and see instantly how many people are involved with a project. Every other web3 project has this, which means they can all be quickly compared (and yes, that’s a KPI they all focus on) - but ThreeFold can’t be compared like that…which means it loses out by comparison.

If we bought it all into Discord things would be better! We could have a channel for signing up new farmers, and a channel for news and a channel for Building stuff, and a channel for announcements etc.

I realize in an ideal world we would use a decentralized tool - but we are now outliers - developers have choices and they make decisions on which projects to support based on quick comparisons: Are these docs easy to navigate, how quickly can I get started, what is the quality of discourse on their Discord…oh they don’t have one? so I have to trawl through a random Telegram channel of people talking about farming rewards…?

I know it’s hard to move away from Telegram because there are thousands of people on the channels - but it would be worth it.

think of when the DAO comes online - Telegram is the wrong medium for this. Witness the first semi GEP you posted a few days ago on Telegram which linked to a forum post, which contained a link to Github and presumably to a voting place as well.

Where is that link now? I didn’t vote yet, I now have to go to Telegram, remember which channel it was posted in (is that Farmers, General or Testing?) - then just start scrolling…oh who posted it, oh it wasn’t posted by the company but by someone, oh yes, Sabrina, scroll, scroll, did I miss it?? Where will they post about the deadline? am I seeing all the channels? What if I’m not? did they post it on the forum? Where?

vs

Discord:
There is a Governance channel, all GEPs go into it, you cannot miss anything because all followers of the Discord see all available channels.

Then vote on the proposal using withtally.com

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel here.

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#10

I clicked on the mattermost link that @gosam posted in his post above -https://news.freeflow.life/. Once I signed in with the ThreeFold Connect app the page redirected to https://news.threefold.me/. Guessing that’s not supposed to happen. Discord works reliably.

#11

I’m for making access and communication easier. Pro/cons of straying from idealism and getting more adoption always have to be weighed. Granted I don’t think we have the traffic quite yet to warrant it.

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#12

According to me @gosam @hannahcordes and myself are already quite busy to moderate ThreeFold current channels. As the intention is to decentralize the project I don’t see why community members couldn’t start a ThreeFold Discord channel and moderate it. We can always support in the relay of information of course.

In reality Telegram remains more decentralized than Discord, but I understand the advantages of hosting a server with various chats which make it easier to navigate. But then why not Mattermost? An open-source version of Discord?

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#13

Great ideas.

Indeed, as a decentralized project, all of those options could be the actual answer.

Let’s have TF members start a channel on Discord.
Let’s have TF members start a channel on Mattermost.
Let’s have devs (and grants) to develop something like Discord, but hosted on the TF Grid.

Then we’d show the other crypto projects what Threefold can do: “First they came for the decentralized Discord-like chat app. Then they stayed for the Layer 0 - We can host any blockchain feature.”

[One thing I don’t get with TF forum is: why are we duplicating every reply? (One reply in the reply thread, another same reply but down the main thread.) It’s hard to follow a discussion.]

Nice discussion.

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#14

there needs to be a single place where new people can come to find out about the project and see how they can get involved. Currently they can go to multiple places and important information is routinely buried in the chat because there are too many conversations happening in one single thread. Witness what happened with the first GEP. It was posted on Telegram and immediately scrolled past as other people had other questions to ask, so it had to be re-posted and re-posted. Starting a community-moderated discord would shard the conversation even more, but at least it would be structured. As to Mattermost, is that the tool behind the freeflow tool? It is not fit for purpose - people joining cannot see the channels available and we had trouble even adding new people to it…and of course the developers don’t actually use it, so where is the real work happening? For the DAO to be real, this all has to be accessible by the community. Who works on what, what is prioritized, voting - you can’t manage this via one Telegram channel!

#15

I’m starting to be a big supporter of this idea, wanted to ask some questions, but in the Telegram channel they just disappear and I don’t think they are worth a forum thread… A discord channel would be perfect!

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#16

Right - that’s why we need it. Important things get buried and effectively lost - who knows who’s seen what? How many times did @sabrinasadik have to re-post the first GEP? Discussion cannot stay focussed around any topics on Telegram because as it’s a free-for-all - anyone can simply say, hey, what’s the ROI for a Titan? and then the chat pivots 100% to answering that question. It’s mad.

We need probably ten or twenty channels.

@kristof just posted two great posts to the Telegram both of which have already been buried by unrelated questions.

When the DAO arrives - everything related to ThreeFold will need to be discussed and agreed with the community, right? How can we do that in one or two Telegram channels?

A suggestion for some channels (from a selection of other web3 Discords I follow):

General
New to ThreeFold - start here
Rules and Links
Get Involved
FAQ
Ask a question
Support
Announcements
Software updates
Grid status

Misc
Industry news
Memes
Random

Team Lobbies
Core devs
Hardware
Growth
Built on ThreeFold

Then Each Team has their own team-specific rooms
Documentation

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#17

I went ahead and started a discord as yesterday there was an announcement that the grid was experiencing difficulties with its network nodes…and then today it was lost in the scroll so I ended up having to write to the original author who told me the grid was back up and live again!

A channel for Grid Status would have been helpful in this instance.

As it’s a community-initiated place at the moment, I can’t force anyone to use it obviously. I’ve done things like post the youtube videos in one channel and the grid enhancement proposals in another and the questions about tokenonomics for a node in another - as currently all those are getting jumbled together in one big chat.

Please feel free to check it out and join if you’d like to, no pressure:https://discord.gg/PaQtT7A72E

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#18

Can you share a new link? This one is not working!

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#19

New link: https://discord.gg/PaQtT7A72E

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#20

Thank you Mike for taking initiative! :fire:

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