With API3 products rolling out, it’s essential to simplify, encourage, and communicate community discussions on Discord around these developments. This post proposes a certain organization of categories and channels. Community feedback on this is very much welcome.
If you agree, disagree, edits, changes, add or delete anything please feel free.
I like think the Ecosystem Projects category addition is a great idea. I’m not particularly fond of adding a Gn/Gm or Music channel (noise). Community Projects as a category also seems unbound and up for too much debate i.e. what constitutes a community project that is sufficiently “worthy” of a category? When do such categories get deleted? Lastly, Dev resources doesn’t seem like something that needs to be standalone from Official Links, at least for the moment.
Love the comments. We can take out the Music channel and Community Project category. Also, we can add Dev resources to resource channel.
For Community Project category, we can revisit this once we have more traction. A possible solution can be doing discord voting on which project gets listed, and we remove projects with inactive channels.
My thought with GM/GN was to have community members hang out and make a simple post to feel part of the community. that’s my gm/gn bullish post for it. lul.
Personally I think too few channels is better than too many. Knowing which channel to use is more or less a constant headache on Discord (and even Slack).
Yeah. Great point. Right now, Discord has 13 channels. And this new one proposes 13 channels (which is mainly reorganization, so people know where to read/talk about certain topics)
API3 (4 channels)
Developer Hub (2 channels- take out dev ideas)
Ecosystem Projects (4 channels)
Community (1 channel)
Info (2 channels)
Hey Rob, I think it’s great to open up this convo.
Have a few thoughts/suggestions;
A place for informal updates from the API3 team could potentially be useful. The announcement channel feels more appropriate for key product/marketing information. This may be similar to your suggestion of ‘official links’?
I’m overall for a dedicated developer category. Having a ‘dev resource’ read-only page, or adding dev-focused resources to the current resource page, feels like low-hanging fruit.
I’ve seen discord functionality for ways of submitting questions. It’s sort of like a forum for the discord. This could be an interesting way for dev-support questions to be submitted and creates a tidy place for these to be stored. You can read more here - Forum Channels: A Space for Organized Conversations (would also be keen to hear thoughts on those active in the dev-support channel around this)
I’m keen to explore how we can capture dev feedback and have been looking into potential mechanics for this. You could potentially use something like https://guild.xyz/ and could also be used for other types of feedback/engagement.
Re the 4x ecosystem projects, would dAPIs be more appropriate vs BYOG? Then would BYOG be a community project? Not sure on the nuances here. Also unsure how the Community Projects would scale without there being tens (eventually hundreds) of channels.
Have also heard others keen to see governance discussion in the discord, but will leave them to share thoughts
I’m not sure how this would affect it, but the main reason I can check #dev-support frequently is because it’s a single channel. As soon as there are multiple channels for me to check I’ll have to give up.
A place for informal updates from the API3 team could potentially be useful. The announcement channel feels more appropriate for key product/marketing information. This may be similar to your suggestion of ‘official links’?
I see this as two separate channels. (1) official links- which stays static and (2) announcements with any news of announcements. Otherwise, the links gets drowned out by the news.
I’m overall for a dedicated developer category. Having a ‘dev resource’ read-only page, or adding dev-focused resources to the current resource page, feels like low-hanging fruit.
I also agree. It’d be a neat place to post any technical content and guides made by the tech team or the community.
I’ve seen discord functionality for ways of submitting questions.
This could also be a great FAQ section (if people read those). I really like the organizational structure of Q and A tbh.
This would be great to launch after we have some time to attract developers with dAPIs and other products are live.
Re the 4x ecosystem projects, would dAPIs be more appropriate vs BYOG?
Thinking about this, I think 3 channels would be enough. It seems the most relevant channels would be (1) dAPI (since it’s the bread and butter) (2) OEV- Huge potential (3) QRNG (because it’s a solid product that has gathered traction). and (4) ChainAPI (because it has had some really fascinating updates and is core to the scaling of API3).
A natural question is dAPI/OEV are not live yet, so maybe they’re channels that later gets added? We should add it now, so it allows the community to dive in to dAPIs and what it means for the industry. Also, dAPIs naturally bakes in BYOG, so we get 2 in 1.
As soon as there are multiple channels for me to check I’ll have to give up.
The idea is to keep dev-support as a main channel. But you’re right, we may have community people asking technical questions on the Project channels (like dAPI and QRNG). If that happens, then it’s our responsibility to redirect them and repost on the dev support channel, so the tech team isn’t needlessly going through channels. IMO it becomes an organizational issue that can be solved by the Discord admins tbh.
@Midhav thoughts on what would be the best way to move forward on this? the big addition would be adding “Ecosystem” for a place to discuss the upcoming developments. If those channels don’t get traction or become entangled with dev-support we can always delete/modify them.
Definitely a worthy re-org. I agree with keeping as few channels as possible – would vote for removing the “Partnerships” channel as well, and perhaps removing the Community category altogether to subsume those topics into “General” (also because General & Community seem similar enough, and Ecosystem v. Community seem to have overlap too). Threads within some of the categories will help reduce clutter too
I really like these comments. Now, I’m also thinking we can remove Info, and move Github Tracker to Developer Hub, (which adds color). Take out “Media Feed” as well since important tweets should go in “Announcements.”
I like the structure you are proposing, @Rico. It’s a minimalistic approach and contains all the channels that are relevant in my opinion.
Considering that the discussion on how to re-design the API3 Discord has been going on for a few months already and nobody objected to your latest suggestion, I will make the changes accordingly within the next 24h. Any objection to that?
I think some of the automated posts auto-posting to the general channel (such as the auto posts that go to governance general and proposal monitor) would be cool to keep on general.
Great. Thank you, @Marcus. The “Ecosystem Talk” channels are obv dead. Can you post short introductions to each channel (copied and pasted from their docs) and pin them, please?
Also, the proposal and governance bot does not seem to be posting onto the general channel since new topics have recently been posted on the forum and were not posted on the general channel. Can you take a look, please?
Also, now I agree with @dcroote, dev resources (being minimal links) can be incorporated into #official-links So the official-links can read:
The governance bot only forwards new topics from the Governance Meta section. That’s how Midhav configured it when he integrated it a year ago. I only changed the channel to #general, so the governance bot no longer forwards these messages to the old #governance channel on Discord. I did the same for the proposal bot. I just tested the bot by creating a new topic, and it works fine. I will look into configuring it to relay every new post to Discord, not just a new topic.
I updated the Official Links section and removed the Dev Resources channel as requested. As for the Ecosystem Talk channels, I will post short introductions as requested.
