Even as it shifts back toward its gaming roots, Discord remains a great platform for emergent tech communities. You can find more of my community writing related to Discord here.
Home Assistant
133,000+ members
Open Source Home Automation that puts Local Control and Privacy First
Massive and engaged Discord community, one of the top open source projects on GitHub.
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Support forums very active here.
Web Game Dev
2,100+ Members
Web Game Dev Community exploring the bleeding edge with making games on the web
Consistently impressed by the output of the devs and the live share-outs they do.
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showcase in webgamedev server
Hugging Face
94,000+ members
Community platform for building, deploying, and training machine learning models.
Collaborative courses are a fantastic community initiative.
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Homebrew Research
11,000+ members
A Local AI company and community
Leading the way with interesting projects like Ichigo, Jan.ai that let you run and own AI.
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Mozilla AI
3,500+ members
Global community dedicated to making open source AI accessible to everyone.
I’m biased here, but this is a great community to join if you want to learn about how to create applications that are shaped and owned by your community.
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The Mozilla Dino sticker is reason enough to join
Google Dev Community
34,000+ members
Global Google brand community of devs.
Big tech is investing here too. Example of a massive tech company using Discord to engage with developers.
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Meta Quest Community
8,000+ members
VR gamer community with dev and general audience overlap
Another example of a big tech company using Discord to engage with a niche audience. I think this community has a lot of potential if Meta would allocate more resources to it for programming/giveaways and support. I love the VR dev AMA’s and they bring in top-tier devs.
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fantastic guests for their Ask me Anything sessions
There are also hundreds of local groups working in emergent tech like AI Tinkers Ottawa led by Hai Nghiem and Neilda Gagné, which are incredibly active and provide immense value to focused groups based on your geography. These groups benefit heavily from cementing their community IRL. There is still no perfect substitute for connecting in person.
Discord has its downsides to consider: data privacy concerns, a closed ecosystem, and limitations in diversity and audience demographics but we can’t ignore the value it provides as to communities in these cases.
Thanks for reading, clap if you dig it.