Snowflake Challenge: Day Five

[tangeriner]

Day 5

In your own space, promote three communities, challenges, blogs, pages, Twitters, Tumblrs or platforms and explain why you love them. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

1. trope_bingo - I love trope bingo so much. I just love tropes generally, but the love is almost too big, so it's nice to have a bingo card to focus that love. It runs twice a year (January to June, June to December), and there are so many tropes that the opt-out options are very generous and make it easy to avoid tropes you really aren't interested in.

2. marvel_bang - I did this for the first time this year and had a blast. It's a very well run bang, and there's a discord for it, and SO MANY STORIES. And it for everything Marvel, so while a significant chunk of the stories were MCU, there was still a space for the smaller Marvel fandoms and the even tinier Marvel D-list X-Men pairs.

3. Earth-616 - full disclosure up front: I am one of the mods on this server. This is more a promotion for Discord in general. It's basically a glorified IRC chat room, but fancier! Earth-616, in particular, is dedicated to all things Marvel Comics (MCU is #off-topic). It has channels dedicated to discussion about the most recent issues, book club, teams, pairings, and more! If anyone has any questions about Discord, please don't ever hesitate to ask. It's become one of my favourite vehicles for fannish interaction. I'm also on the Steve/Tony (616) discord and the Yuletide discord, both of which are very active and keep me feeling involved in fandom, even if I mostly lurk on those.

Comments

[wendelah1]

Hi! Is there a "Discord for Dummies" type reference anywhere? I don't know where to begin.

[tangeriner]

Unfortunately, I haven't seen one. :(

The basic idea is:

1. You create a Discord account for yourself. Your basic Discord name doesn't have to be unique, because Discord will automatically assign you a number. For instance, I'm Tangerine#1082, but my name to everyone else just shows up as Tangerine. You also can set an image (like a DW icon).

2. You accept invites to Discords. It's tracking down these invites that can be a bit of a challenge (this will be the hardest part). Sometimes, it's asking a fandom friend if they know of any Discords about whatever fandom or topic of interest you might be looking for. Sometimes, the link will be publicly available somewhere. Some of the bigger Discords will link to smaller Discords in their rules/info/FAQ channels.

3. You can join as many Discords as you want.

4. Each Discord will have some sort of "theme". There are multiple chat channels in each Discord.

5. Each Discord will have a list of people in the Discord (sometimes all of them, sometimes just the people online).

6. It is possible to direct message (DM) people in Discord and add Discord friends that exist outside a specific Discord. In the Discord app, there's a "Home" button that keeps track of all your friends and all your DMs.

7. I use Discord on both my phone and my desktop. Desktop, imo, is best for newbies, because less things are hidden, but the phone app is really good, too.

8. I found it REALLY helpful to join a bigger server to get the general idea of how it works. The Yuletide and Fandom Exchanges discord doesn't announce when you join, so it's very good to lurk on and get the lay of the land. It's a good example of a typical well-run Discord (multiple chat channels, active mods, friendly users, a FAQ channel that explains the entire Discord, and it's 100% fannish).

If you decide to poke around, feels free to add me as a friend on there (Tangerine#1082 is my Discord tag) and I would be happy to help. Unfortunately, I am only really in various comic book and challenge/exchange discords, so I'm have no idea how to find ones dedicated to other fandoms. (Finding the links to the Discords are truly the hardest part...!)

[wendelah1]

2. You accept invites to Discords. It's tracking down these invites that can be a bit of a challenge (this will be the hardest part). Sometimes, it's asking a fandom friend if they know of any Discords about whatever fandom or topic of interest you might be looking for. Sometimes, the link will be publicly available somewhere. Some of the bigger Discords will link to smaller Discords in their rules/info/FAQ channels.

Thanks. Maybe someday someone will create a way to find them more easily. The truth is, I'm barely in "Fandom" at this point, let alone a specific one, so it's probably not a worthwhile effort for me to make. I will try the Yuletide discord next year if I decide to sign up. I wrote a pinch hit this year which was a weirdly isolating experience because it was such a small fandom that there was literally no one to talk to about it, apart from my recipient.

[tangeriner]

You're welcome! I think I like Discord because I was suffering from fannish loneliness. My fandom is quite tiny. For a while, it felt like it was just me, and now it's not so quiet. Which is nice. :)

[fjbryan]

Thanks for the intro on Discord (another noob trying to figure it out as a means of interaction). Not sure how to find what I'm looking for, but I'll post a query to the sherlock_bbc comm and see if somebody answers with a pointer/invite.

[tangeriner]

You're welcome! It's still pretty newish for fannish stuff (I think it has its origins in the video game realm), so there may not be a Discord for something... yet. But sometimes just asking the question is enough to get the wheels turning in the right direction. Good luck! :)