Discord channels

I'm in a couple of Discord servers, nice places which are about chatting to friends and not so much about promoting something or doing "community management". Here's some channels I like in them!

• #content-warning / #im-fuming-because: it's nice to have somewhere to put misery! it makes it easier to not see misery if you don't want to, but more importantly it lowers the barrier to posting misery - if people see it they knew what they were coming for!
• #fascism : similarly, it's nice to have #politics but also sometimes you need a super-politics channel for the really depressing stuff
• #dream-diary

here is somewhere you can post about your dreams and know that if people didn't want to read it, it's their problem

• or, alternatively, #drains-and-dreams. this is a channel for chat about drains (and plumbing more generally). and also for dreams. and also for stuff that crosses between the two. i think it's important to have stupid injoke channels. that's where the culture is.
• similarly #slug-central, #stanthony, #bird-in-bens-living-room etc
• #this-server or #server-suggestions. somewhere to talk about the server itself
• #self-promo or #making-whatever or #what-are-you-working-on or something. something where it is explicitly encouraged to talk about the things you are doing. people can be shy otherwise! worried about spamming! but it's nice to see that stuff!
• #downpour - yes definitely important to have a channel for sharing cool Downpours that people have made or played. yes yes. vital.
• #instasham or #camera-roll. somewhere to post pictures. you can even prohibit people from posting text in this channel, too, if you want. somewhere people can share the cool bird they saw, again without fear of spamming. that's what a lot of these channels are about - either giving someone implicit permission to post something they might be hesitant to post, or giving people the ability to ignore a category of thing they might not want to see. or both at the same time.
• #rss-salon - a place for a bot to automatically post things from people's RSS feeds. i have written about this before.
• channels for people who want to practice specific languages. i mean, i am not currently learning a language, so this isn't useful to me in an active way. but it's a cute thing to see anyway.
• i don't do this, but it seems like a nice idea:

however, i am on a little private Mastodon server with a similar community size, and one thing that is nice about it is that it has Posting Energy (as distinct from chatting energy, there's something about the way that posts are sent out into the void and are not implicitly a response to anything anyone else is saying). this might be a way to get Posting Energy onto Discord.

• a "specific things" category. for stuff that there's repeated conversations about. maybe it's nicer to use threads for this, but no-one can ever find them if they didn't get in them from the start, so maybe not.
• i mean also lots of other channels for things people might wanna talk about. tv shows, videogames, exercise, their art practice, books they're reading, whatever. idk, you can add them whenever there's a sufficient volume of chat to make them seem worth having.

Also on the subject of Discord - did you know you can "ignore" people now? it's like muting. their messages still show up (and annoyingly will set a channel to be unread, i assume for arcane operating systems at scale reasons), but you have to click through to actually read them. very helpful for That One Guy. i have definitely been in communities that suffered slow evaporation because of One Guy Who Not Actually Harmful But Is A Little Irritating before. maybe "ignore" helps with that. or maybe it just means it's even less likely anyone does anything about it.