 In this video, I'm going to be talking about Discord as it compares to Facebook groups as a place to host online communities. Now, you may be a member of lots of Facebook groups and wonder what all the fuss is about Discord because there is a growing number of people that are moving their communities from Facebook to Discord and indeed other platforms as well. But what is it that is driving that and why is it that some people are feeling that their communities could be hosted on better platforms than Facebook groups? Well, you may have encountered some of the potential issues with Facebook groups or on the other hand, you may have just sort of been going along with it thinking that that is the way that things should be and need to be without realizing that there is another alternative. I myself have been in countless Facebook groups. I literally don't know how many I'm in. I haven't counted them up, but I am a member of a lot of them and that is possibly one of the reasons why so many people do use Facebook as their sort of first idea when they think about, right, well, we've got a collection, you know, a group of people that we want to bring together and have a sort of collective online. Then where should we do that? Well, everyone's on Facebook. Everyone knows how Facebook groups work. So let's all come together and create a Facebook group. It's great. It's possibly arguably a little bit lazy as well because it's not necessarily the best place for it. And so I'm just coming out with my cards on the table here that I'm not a huge fan. Now that I've seen that there is another way to do these sorts of things. So we'll be talking about Discord from the point of view of specifically, let me just get this straight, why I think it is better than Facebook to host your community. The top thing about this is we've talked about Facebook being, you know, it's ubiquitous. Everybody's on Facebook. But one of the things about Facebook is it does have this endless scroll. The aim of Facebook is to keep you on Facebook so that they can obviously serve you ads and things like that. So we just want to keep you on that platform. And I know that that's the same for lots of other things. It's the same for YouTube, you know. We want, as YouTubers, we want, you know, people to continue to watch our videos. YouTube wants to keep people on YouTube as well for exactly the same reasons. So I'm not disputing that for one minute. But when it comes to a community space, that's not necessarily the kind of driving force that we want to be actually, you know, driving the interactions that we're having in the community space that we're trying to create. So Facebook are basically applying that same sort of scrolling idea to all of the conversations that are going on in your community, in your Facebook group. And that's just simply not natural, is it? It's not natural to just come in and listen to, you know, who's talking the loudest or the people that are having a conversation right at the front and ignoring everything that's happened, you know, maybe yesterday, depending on how big the group was, the conversations from yesterday can easily get lost. And if you just don't scroll down enough, you're not gonna see all of that great information. So it's not got a great deal of sort of discoverability, apart from what's the latest thing that people are talking about. That also brings me on to then the sort of general organization. It is just a stream of posts of things like that. And again, in no particular order, it's not in total date order either because you might end up with a post that was three years ago. Somebody's just chimed in with their opinion or comment on it. And then that one comes rising to the top of the list as well. It's just not the best way to organize things in my mind because there is no organization there. Then it comes to the idea of search and finding things. Technically, yes, we do have a search function in Facebook, but I don't know about you. I've never really found it that great. Depending on the group you're in, you know, if you only got a few posts or it's not a very active group or something, the mileage may vary on this, but whenever I've tried to find stuff in the sort of popular groups that I am a member of, it's been quite tricky to find what I'm looking for if I've tried to search for it. And often I'll see a post and then I'll think, you know, later on, maybe a few days later or something, maybe someone asks me about it. And I think, oh, there was definitely a post about that in that group. I'll do a quick search, no luck, can't find it. I'll try maybe to scroll. Again, depending on how active the group is, you could be scrolling for a long time, totally miss the post or not be able to find it. Again, it's reliant on actually seeing it and so it's a little bit tricky. Sometimes it's a post that I might have commented on or someone commented on my behalf mentioned me in it or something like that. And then it's a case of going through my Facebook notifications and trying to find the one from my notification history. Again, more scrolling to try to get to it. This is another sort of thing about it as well. Because people are on Facebook for lots of other things and because it is just intended to, you know, keep people scrolling. You really don't have the focus when people go to Facebook and I'm speaking from personal experience here. If I think, right, I'm gonna go and check out, you know, the Ecamm Live group, for example. I might go to Facebook to go to the Ecamm Live group, but straight away I'm presented with things that, you know, Facebook has engaged that I probably want to have a look at. So, you know, this is straight away before I've even got to the point of going into the group. It's already trying to catch me with this scrolling content and things like that. And the same for if I go to notifications, trying to find any notifications relative to the group. It's just one big pot, basically, where I'm getting all of the notifications together and so there is no sort of focus. So it does lack this sort of focus. By contrast, let's just come and have a look at an example of a server. And a fine example of a server, not the best one, I should say, but still a good first attempt would be my server. So that is at takeonetech.io slash Discord. So obviously there's a bit of conditioning going on here. I'm trying to explain to you why I think that this is a good place to grow my online community. But if I come over to my Discord server, the thing that is different, and by the way, I've done a video all about sort of the way that you can organize things in terms of the server is just another name for my community, my home, my place that I'm inviting you into. So don't be put off by the word server, by the way. It's just the place to host your community. So consider it the equivalent of the group part of Facebook group. So this is just my little group. And then you've got different ways to organize things. So already we've got something that is lacking in Facebook, which is that we do have all of these different sort of groupings of the conversations that people can have. So the thing about my particular channel, so having a Discord server for my channel makes a lot more sense than a Facebook group because the other thing about Facebook group is you might want to have different topics and things like that that are covered. And certainly on my channel, I mean, I've covered all sorts of things like Mac automation, I'm talking about Discord right now, obviously, but I've also talked about Stream Deck and Ecamm Live together and separately on a number of occasions, like over 100 plus videos on just those two things. But then I talk about other things like, for example, SetApp. So people are finding my content for different reasons and with SetApp, I've got a whole series of videos that are just on the SetApp apps. So there may be people who watch my videos, who subscribe, who may be really only interested in that, maybe they don't use Ecamm Live, they don't use Stream Deck and they're just interested in the SetApp stuff or maybe just the automation stuff. Well, if we were in a Facebook group with everyone all sort of thrown into the mix together, then people would be coming to that feed in that group and some of it would just seem like, well, I'm not really interested in any of this. Whereas with Discord, we can be very intentional about the groupings of things. So for example, if I scroll down here, the channel obviously take one tech. So lots of tech talk basically, but it is now split up into, yeah, all the people who like my Ecamm Live videos, then we've got a section there to talk about Ecamm Live stuff. The people who like Stream Deck, that is there for them too. Productivity, I do talk about YouTube analytics and monetization and stuff like that, more so in my live streams, my weekly updates that I do. So that is a place to talk about that. Obviously just started producing my courses. So Ecamm Live Masterclass for one, that is something that I'm doing on Kajabi. So we do more content around that. So the point is, we've got this organizational structure here that is just completely lacking in Facebook. So that is a great reason to consider something like Discord because you can then go into these conversations. And what you'll also notice is, there is nothing jumping out at me trying to distract me. If I am somebody who's coming into here wanting to learn about something or engage about something or join in the conversation about something, then I can just go to the specific point that I have an interest in without just being bombarded with all of the other stuff together. The other thing that is great about Discord is you can also segment people as well. So you could have little subgroups for things so that people could say, well, I'm only interested in certain things and so they only get access to certain things. So where I've mentioned about, obviously about these separate things for Ecamm Live, Stream Deck, Automation, all that sort of stuff, people could actually select just the ones that they want to see so that these ones don't even appear for them if that is what they wanted. But you can also create separate spaces. So for example, with my Ecamm Live Masterclass, when people sign up to that, then they do get access to the Ecamm Live Masterclass area of the Discord server. So that is kind of like a sort of member's only area. Same with my Buy Me A Coffee. So it's a good time to mention that. BuyMeACoffee.com slash take one tech. That's the best way to support the channel on a one-off or ongoing basis. And so if people have joined the Buy Me A Coffee membership over there, then they get access to some specific areas of the server that aren't available to everyone else. So you can actually arrange people into different membership tiers, things like that, or just give them access, as I say, to things like courses where you want a little community around that specific course for people who are attending it. So there's lots of ways that you can work with this with different roles and things like that. You still do have the ability in Discord to tag people. So people who are in the server, you can actually tag them and so that they will see those notifications. And that there, again, is coming back to this whole thing of focus because rather than looking at Facebook and seeing a notification about every single group that you remember of and all of your personal Facebook notifications just all mashed together in one big long list. Here, when you come into the server, it will actually say the notifications that you have. And so if you were mentioned in anything in that server, so people can be a lot more intentional about what they're doing. I mean, part of my thing with productivity that I focus on with my, you know, my own task management and things like that, one of the big lessons that you'll get from David Allen's Getting Things Done is the whole thing of context to all of the tasks that you have to do, which is you don't want to be presented with all of the tasks that you've got on your task list when A, you can't necessarily do them because you don't have all the things you need at that particular time or they're just not relevant to the task in hand as it were. And so that I think translates quite nicely over to Discord as well, which is I don't want to see the notifications of everything that's going on in my life on Facebook just because I happen to come to this particular group. I only want to see the notifications that are relevant to this group if I'm being intentional about coming here. So that is another thing that you'll get in Discord is the sort of notifications. You can also be very intentional about what you're doing in particular channels as well. So you could turn off notifications on certain things and only be shown the things that matter to you. And you can also just sort of hide any things in this side column that you are not in the sidebar that you're not actually interested in or you don't want to receive notifications about. So the final thing though is the fact that it's not just a place for chat in terms of text chat and talk and things like that, like you've got in Facebook. Obviously with Facebook you can do live streams into a particular group. Well, you can do that in here as well but you can actually go one step further because you can actually do full on video calls. And that might be that you want to be able to allow your community to come together just to have a general call like as if it was a Zoom call. But you can also do it if you were going to be doing a presentation or the equivalent of a live stream where you were the one that was streaming and you don't necessarily want everyone else to be jumping up. So you could actually just do effectively a live stream into one of the video channels in there as well. There's also, I'll just mention this one as well, there's also the ability to do effectively the same as Clubhouse. So you can have a sort of voice, it's not called a voice channel but something similar to Clubhouse whereby you can have an audio only event where you can still invite people up. So effectively it's Clubhouse, potentially Zoom, it's kind of live streaming as well, all wrapped into this with all of the messaging and things like that. All in all, I feel it's just a much better sort of organizational structure to it. Now I did do a video previously which was sort of giving it an overview of Discord. So definitely check that one out if you haven't already. But this is basically just a very sort of high level of the reasons why I think that this is a sort of better approach to managing a community and hosting a community than with Facebook groups. Now there is a much better resource than my channel to find out all about that and that is Discord for Creators. Now what I'll do is I'll leave a link to the playlist which contains a lot of Discord for Creators videos over on the right hand side and you can become enlightened as I did after I discovered it.