Hi, this is the first time I post something here, I hope it's the beginning of many more great contributions to the Swift lang and community.
As to my knowledge, there isn't an official Swift Community Discord server, I've looked a bit, and found a couple unofficial ones. But idk I just felt they weren't quite fully baked as one might say, and also in my journey of looking for that, I was kinda compering what I found with the Rust Lang Community Discord server, which I think is a very great one in what it's doing, so I hope Swift Community also get something similar.
now I will list a what I think a few of the benefits of creating such server would be:
getting to know other Swift devs, and possible future friends
quick help from community in case of any issues people face, especially for newer programmers
ease of general chat and discussions among the community members
showing off cool projects :>
and yeah that's it, lets hear back from you guys on what you think about this idea, and what other benefits could arise from having a community server.
I think this is a good idea but my only concern is how it would affect this forum. I find forums better for asking questions and for searching. I like Discord/Slack for chat and short discussions.
(Improving the visibility of this is being talked about)
In terms of Discord vs Slack - they both have their advantages and disadvantages (I say this as someone who manages both). One of the big benefits of Slack is that it's a lot easier to get it approved in corporate environments, which is important if you want people from different companies to be able to access it during work time
Discord provides group video and audio channels for free. Unlike Slack which limits this to one-on-one on the free tier. I would love to be in a Swift Discord that has monthly presentations on various Swift topics. I would like to also mention that Discord's moderation features are superior to Slack.
I quote from the first website that comes in my face when I google "forum vs discord"
Traditional forums work more like email threads, with people writing out entire thoughts on a subject before pressing send. Discord is more like texting, with stream-of-consciousness reactions sent as individual messages that can quickly crowd a vertically scrolling thread. It's more casual, but harder to parse.
so what I think is that nothing the replacing the other, I just think that Discord is good for more casual talking and discussion, and the forum for more serious talks
I'm not as social-media active as a lot of folks, so I'd be interested to hear from others what their perception has been of the communities of other tools going through the same (adding a Discord/Slack/etc when an existing dev community's discussion is largely built around a forum).
If it were to add more casual discussion without taking away much, then I'd be whole-heartedly for it. I could even see it being positive for the quality of this forum. But if it were to lead to a significant drop in the deep, thoughtful discussion that happens in total (and especially here), I'd be really sad.
I totally agree with you.
of course the "deep thoughtful discussion" are way more important and helpful then the more lite ones that could come on discord, and so if the discord server's existence will lower the quality of the discussions here, it's not gonna be worth it.
but I think that the goal is to have the best of both worlds, having the deep discussions here, and the lite ones, casual chatting there.
and I think this could also potentially increase the quality of the discussions on the forum, by pushing the more lite discussions to discord, the forum could be a place full of the deep discussions.
love to hear back from you on what you think about this
While it's relatively easy to initiate a conversation in Discord (or Slack) I am just concerned about the indexing of questions by search engines.
For context, I am one of the maintainers for a Python ASGI framework, the Discord server has 1.5k ish members, it's fairly active and we get asked questions of varying difficulties but we have not found an easy way to make these questions visible to the "outside world" (non discord users).
Yep, totally. Just wary of anything that might damage a good thing. For now I've joined the Slack that was posted above and I could see that (or something like it; I think I prefer Discord?) being a good way to meet people and chat about less in-depth stuff.
Today came one example where Slack/Discord will be better suited IMHO—discussing this article Leaving Rust
It’s not about Swift, and feels like not suited to discuss here, but would be nice to chat causally about other languages, design, and what we can learn from it.
