I get the impression that a lot of interesting community convening is happening on Discord/Slack, but I haven't figured out how to engage with those mediums without producing scattered mind. Any tips/insights? (beyond obvious—"disable notifs, unread dots, timebox" etc)
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I notice that if I aggressively timebox Discord/Slack, and open only once a day or two, like email, then I don't get the feel of building a connection with a community at all. This is different from Twitter / mailing lists / forums, where the medium's more OK with infrequency.
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So far I haven't found a solution. I theorise what might help is many more notification filtering options. But they don't exist yet really.
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I have noticed the same thing& am effectively abstaining from all of these. there's real value but individually I am not currently able to harvest any of it at a commensurate (not excessive) cost in terms of fragmentation, feeling like I'm doing too many things poorly etc
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I think one important thing with using discord/slack well is that there's no catching up on it. While you're there you're there, you might read maybe a page of scrollback to get context tops, but you don't attempt to read anything from while you're gone.
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So it's more like a room you wander into from time to time, it doesn't have the persistent individual presence of something like Twitter or Facebook even though everyone is nominally there all the time.
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For Obsidian, you stay off of Discord and subscribe to ’s weekly Obsidian Roundup newsletter. 😁
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Completely agree with this. I've not figured out how to really maximize discord.
For slack, I tick the checkbox on the "See all unreads" option on the sidebar (after clicking more) and just use that as my guide. Has been very helpful.
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Maybe treat it like a social event? I.e. visit once a week for a few hours to be present vs. going every day for a few minutes to catch up. (Just brainstorming here; I don't actually have much experience with either platform.)
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Hmm same. Often feels like I'm interrupting a tight-knit community. It's not that the actual folks aren't welcoming. It's not even inside jokes I don't get. It's rather the sensation of stumbling into a room of people already talking, but on the web.
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With IRC, there was no history. You logged in, joined a room, then said "hello", and thus announced your presence.
With the model of Slack and Discord you don't join and leave rooms all the time and greet everyone when you enter. You're already there, but AFK.
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