A Discord server seems to meet many of my “small social network” needs. The hacker spirit of this post is fun but it can be hard to get friends to value it as much as the person running it might.
Created a tiny Discord for some friends and have been wondering what I can do to make it worth spending time on (specifically, how do I make it more interesting than all the other servers they could be spending time on--if I just copy what I've seen works, then I'll probably just have the same thing with less activity).
Worth mentioning my specific intention was to foster the sort of high quality discussion that is possibly unique to this website. So I guess I'm wondering if HN's recipe can be replicated, and what's the secret sauce. Strong rules and moderation? But the culture seems to play a big role too.
When we were initially discussing moving off Facebook I looked at self-hosted options, including mastodon, but we explicitly did not want federation—just a private group for us.
I'm struggling with the following question and I also want to ask you the same question: Would you want anything other than the functionality Whatsapp has to offer? Why didn't you already use Whatsapp or an equal solution?
signed: a person who maintains a mumble server... that no one uses.