We wanted to be active on Discord as we wanted to be able to answer outsiders questions. Using both Slack and Discord was not letting us do that because out internal communication was happening on Slack, so we would always be online on Slack, but Discord we would be often offline, and if outsiders came asking some question, they saw an empty Discord server.

Since we have a server with people from outside as well as FifthTry people, we have created some internal roles, so we do not accidently mention outsiders.

All our internal roles start with ft-. Every other role should be assumed external.

When you join Discord as an employee, or contractor, freelancer etc, you will be assigned a role “ft-zens”. Feel free to mention this role everytime you have anything interesting to say, there is no filter against using this role.

This role used to be called dd-com, we changed this role. This is related to people who joins the Monday’s demo day planning meeting.

We have a lot of channels that are used internally that serves various purposes.

Here is the list of them:

• water-cooler: Updates on the work-related stuff which does not lie in any of the dedicated channels on Discord.

  • Communication to individuals: Under the water-cooler channel we use individuals’ threads. To ensure that they are notified of any messages, use the “@” symbol followed by their name to tag them in the thread. This increases the likelihood that the individual will see and respond to the message in a timely manner.

• Voice-channels: We understand that at times it is required to discuss things over calls as it is not easy to discuss everything on text. For the same, we have voice-channels that comes handy to have one-to-one or group discussions.

• marketing-and-sales: Anything and everything related to marketing.

• demo-days: To share the URLs of video prepared by individual to showcase the work done throughout the week, based on the demo-day planning meeting. To know more, you can checkout Demo day.

• day-to-day: to update if one is on leave or any such discussion.

• random: It is meant to be a lighter and more informal space for sharing content. For example, you might say that it’s a place to share non-work-related posts, thoughts, jokes, and memes with your colleagues.

If we send a message to these, a lot of outsiders will get a notification, and if the notification they get is not relevant to them, they will likely curse us, leave the channel, or even block us or report us as SPAM.

Any role not explicitly listed in the previous section is a public role, and should not be used.

Exception: Only people who are in public relations team, can avoid this. Even when we avoid, an explicit permission from CEO has to be taken before mentioning outsiders.

Invite links can be used for tracking purpose, like if we control what invite link we share at what “marketing channel”, we can see how many people joined us from that channel.

We can disable invite link creation, but I feel that will deter out end users from inviting their friends, so we are going to rely on self control. Please use the following invite links only when sharing.

• general link

Currently we have not curated the invite links and we have a mess, we will update this page when we have gotten rid of other invite links from our various pages.

Till this point we were using Slack for internal communication, and Discord was only for external communication. Around this time we decided to move full time here.

I create the server when we decided we are focussing on ftd as a product, and we have to create a community.