Suggestion: Better onboarding for newcomers joining Discord

[Neikon]

Hi!

I have a small suggestion after spending time exploring and researching the Bluefin community.

Like many people, one of the first places I looked for was the Bluefin Discord. After joining, it felt very quiet, and my initial impression was that the community wasn't very active.

Only later did I discover that most of the discussions, ideas, design decisions, and long-form conversations actually happen here on GitHub Discussions.

In hindsight, I don't think the problem is Discord itself. The only thing I felt was missing was a clear signpost for newcomers.

Would it make sense to add a prominent message in Discord (for example in the welcome channel, a pinned post, or the server description) saying something like:

Looking for discussions?

GitHub Discussions is the primary place for project questions, ideas, feature requests, and long-form conversations.

Discord is mainly intended for real-time chat and quick troubleshooting.

This isn't about moving activity back to Discord—I actually think GitHub Discussions is the better place for long-term conversations.

It's simply about helping newcomers who naturally join the Discord first understand where the community actually is.

Without that guidance, it's easy to leave with the impression that the project has very little community activity, when in reality it's just happening somewhere else.

I experienced exactly that myself, so I thought it might be worth suggesting.

Thanks for considering it!

[passthejoe]

Is there even an official Bluefin Discord? I had no idea. Maybe it's not so "official."

I get that from a project standpoint it's easier to have discussion in Github b/c there's no maintenance burden, and everything is in one place. And if the project is relying on Github for so many things, it might as well rely on it for forum-type functionality as well.

I did like using the Discourse forum that the project used before GitHub Discussions. I kind of feel like starting lots of threads is not encouraged here, while a dedicated forum does encourage that. Part of that is that there are not individual topic areas -- it's just one big list of posts.

A lot of similar projects use Matrix and Telegram with bridges between them. I'm on Matrix for that reason, but getting started with Matrix (I've never done Telegram) when you're not already there is a bit of a leap. The complexity level is a little too high for my taste (it gives IRC, as the kids might say). Matrix also tends to be very much "big list of posts with no organization," so that might not be any better than GitHub Discussions.

[sebjag]

Is there even an official Bluefin Discord?

Link here: #2780
and here: https://projectbluefin.io/#scene-community