Tom Critchlow, who I discovered through searching for Jekyll templates at some point, is trying out using Discord as the comment "space" for his blog:

Let’s not call it a community. Discord feels more like a space than a community - there’s no user accounts (you make a discord account not a tomcritchlow-discord account). And increasingly the open social spaces like twitter are fragmenting into smaller semi-public or private discord spaces. In my own groups Discord is rapidly out-pacing Slack as the default “space” for conversation.

Once they add threading Discord will really arrive  

https://tomcritchlow.com/2020/07/08/discord/

I dig it.

As I write this he's sharing a Figma document that he's working on in real time along with being in the open voice chat inside Discord to answer people's questions about what he's doing with the blog redesign he's working on. I love the ability to work in the open like that.

We've had a Discord for Goodstuff Patreon supporters and it works great to have a safe, private space to chat about the podcasts we produce, and whatever else is going on in the lives of the supporters and creators on the network.

I've been using a seperate "Lemon Productions" Discord for a few clients that don't already have some sort of Slack or Teams already set up and it's been good there as well - a new channel for each new episode we're working on helps keep everything organized and easy to track.

Right now I'm toying with opening up part of the Lemon Discord to folks who subscribe or watch my YouTube channel. I really enjoiy responding to the comments and questions from viewers, and I think the interactions help my videos rank higher. But it also feels like I might be missing out on bringing together a community of macOS / iOS audio nerds who could help each other out, in addition to whatever expertise I bring to the room.

I'm torn on having some sort of gateway to get in to the group, especially if it's based on a YouTube channel. Even just a $1/month membership run via Memberful would be enough to help minimize the spam possibilities.

But seeing how Tom's Discord has remained people genuinely interested in a community about blogging - so far anyway - gives me hope that maybe it's worth a try to open mine up for free for now and see what happens. A properly configured Discord bot can help a ton with keeping garbage out of the Discord space.

If you're interested in helping me test this out or just checking out what Discord looks like, here's an invite link to join my Lemon Productions space. (If you get an error trying to join, it may mean that the link has expired. Send me a tweet and I'll get it sorted for you.)