🎉 Join Our New Discord Playground!

John shares the new changes to our Discord server and why it’s a great time to join us there.

💡 Two Trips Around the Sun! 🌞

Can you believe it? We've officially completed two incredible years of the Remarkist project, and what a journey it's been! 🎉 From our humble beginnings in those Gilmore Girls watch parties to a now budding community of creative souls—we've come a long way, baby. And one area of our ecosystem that has vastly transformed is our Discord. 

We’ve just made some big changes to our Discord server, which will go through more over the coming months. Discord has been a pain point for some, but we think the coming changes will demystify much of that confusion. Let's start by looking at why we think Discord is so important to our journey. 🚀

🎮 Discord: More Than Just Social Media

Discord isn't your ordinary social media platform—it's like a lab or workshop setting for community collaboration. I believe this is why many folks don’t get it. The concept of a community creating together—versus simply sharing their mutual interests—is fairly new.

The platform began as a chat app for gamers in 2016, and its immediacy of communication sets it apart from other big social media. Gamers are collaborative and interactive. They don’t just sit back and watch.

We believe many television, film, and book fans exhibit a similar passion for engaging their favorite franchises with other fans. Discord offers a vibrant, techy experience that, yes, can be overwhelming at times. But here's the thing: the future of communities lies in building remarkable content collaboratively, and Discord is playing a larger and larger role in shaping that future! 🌟

With over 100 million monthly active users, Discord has grown far beyond its gaming origins. It has become a hub for communities across all interests (including my very own neighborhood's community watch! No kidding!). Its versatility and power have captured our attention, compelling us to explore its potential as a helpful tool for our development. The remarkable thing is, Discord's evolution aligns with our growth as a platform! 🌈

Have you joined us there yet? Hopefully, some of what I share here will convince you to tap this button below and get started. Or if you’ve just been away for a while, perhaps you’ll be inspired to return.

✨ A New Chapter: Changes to Our Remarkist Discord

Hold onto your seats because we've made some exciting changes to our Discord server! We've revamped our channel structure, consolidating our main member roles into just three—Attendee, Aficionado, and All In. Choosing one of those roles will condense or expand the number of channel categories you see based on your interests. 📚🎥🎵 If our Discord server gets too overwhelming, choose a lower role to quiet things down.

Now boasting over 40 channels across 11 tailored categories, our Discord server has something for everyone. Whether you're into TV, film, music, gaming, or even collecting in-game goodies, there's a space just for you! Plus, members can personalize their experience and curate their own version of the Remarkist Discord Server. 🎨

Discord has a new button at the top of the channel list called Channels & Roles. Answer some questions there and see our list of channels morph to fit those answers. You can choose one of our three member roles and a few others, giving you access to even more niche categories of our ecosystem.

🆘 The Remarkist Support Center

We've heard your calls for support, and we're thrilled to introduce the all-new #support-center channel! Here, you'll find an array of support documents that form the foundation of our ecosystem-wide knowledge base.

This set of support documents began over a year ago with the incredible contributions of some of our community members in support roles, and we’re excited to share it with you finally.

If anything is ever confusing about our Discord, we’ll have a support document to explain. Unsure how to use our app? Lots of simple walkthroughs will get you up to speed.

The #support-center is also where you can find our #help-desk for more personal guidance. Need assistance in a pinch? Our dedicated moderation teams are here to help you navigate the Remarkist world and provide quick answers to your questions. 📚

We’ve reduced those teams to just four, and you can learn all about them in our “Remarkist Teams” article in the #support-center.

💫 The Emporium

Hold onto that DKRN! Cause our #emporium is ‘bout to have a significant upgrade! Get ready to explore a rotating selection of limited-time shops, starting with offerings from yours truly and the Remarkist platform, including my Marvelous Mrs. Maisel-inspired shop, The Millinery! 

But that's not all—eventually, we'll open the floor to community members, allowing others to open pop-up shops around their creations too! 🛍️

🎁 Our New Member Starter Pack 

Are you new to Remarkist and wondering how to get your hands on some crunchy DKRN? Our new #starter-pack channel will get new members (and some established ones, too) ready to go. We now have a simple DKRN dispenser in that channel that doles out a one-time 5000 DKRN grant to any member who hasn’t already gotten one. Have you gotten one? If the answer is no, then I think you should.

That starter pack also includes our new T-Shirts feature. We now allow all members to pick from a selection of 8 Remarkist colors we call shirts. Doing so will magically change your display name to that color. You can find the T-Shirt Armoire in our #starter-pack channel, and as more and more members don their favorite shirts, our chat channels should start to come to life with color.

We’ll even use this new feature to add special limited-time colors to the Armoire so that we can celebrate holidays or support our favorite causes together.

🌈 Server Boosters

We've got something special for our Server Boosters, too! While Boosters typically rock the fuchsia color Discord gives them, we invite them to join the Remarkist color party and swap out that fuchsia for one of the T-Shirts in our Armoire. 🎉 But we couldn't stop there! We're gifting our Boosters two additional colors as a token of gratitude for their support. 🎨✨

To show our appreciation, we've created a dedicated channel where Boosters can enjoy exclusive perks, including a small monthly grant of our DKRN token.

For those who are not ready to boost our server or would like to support the project in other ways, don’t worry! We'll add exclusive ways to grab small amounts of DKRN along your Remarkist journey and bridge the gap between its KRNL sister token in our official app. 💪

🎉 Transitioning from Clubhouse 🚀

After careful consideration, we've decided to officially bid farewell to Clubhouse and embrace new horizons on our remarkable journey. While Clubhouse was once our go-to destination, recent changes have made it harder to provide the seamless experience we strive for. 

Simplifying our approach, we also realized it was time to consolidate the number of third-party apps we used. This means focusing our efforts on platforms that align more closely with our vision and offer enhanced features for our community. Efficiency, here we come! 💪

In the future, Discord will be our primary platform for hosting events that don't take place within our Remarkist app's Audio Dens. The transition process has been smooth for our community members so far—schedule your event in our app, and our dedicated @sweet hosts will create a designated room in our Discord's Expo Center category! 🎙️🎊

Discord's stages offer us a few advantages over our Audio Dens. They provide a similar audio-focused environment but also include text chat functionality, making discussions interactive even for those who choose not to speak at the events. And wait for it—some events will even have video capabilities to take the experience to the next level! 🌟📺

This new approach will help us understand what features to bring to the Remarkist app, what stuff we love most about the Discord event experience, and what we can’t get from Discord but can offer in the Remarkist app.

📢 Official Account and Communication Refined

To boost efficiency (and, let’s say it: professionalism 😆), we've introduced our shiny new Official Account! 📢 This dedicated account will handle official announcements and manage various administrative aspects of our Discord server. It's a milestone in our community's development, marking a new era of clear communication and smooth sailing.

The account can be distinguished by its Remarkist red-backed logo and a little official red logo following its display name.

The tone of our announcements is changing too. Expect more concise and formatted announcements that are just that: announcements. Interactive stuff like questions and polls will now live in our new #official-polls channel for members to engage and share feedback on official matters. And my own questions? You’ll find those where others ask questions—in public channels.

Because most importantly, our new Official Account will allow me to more clearly separate my role as platform head from my place as a regular community member. I’ll be able to spend more time on the platform as Unboiled 🥚—engaging like everyone else and keeping a clear delineation between my work on the platform and my relationships with all of you. In fact, you shouldn’t assume that the Official Account will always be me. It won’t. And our official announcements and administrative responsibilities will also involve various other team members and designated individuals.

It also means my DMs are no longer open for official project-related stuff. If you have a question or concern about anything functional in the app, our Discord server, or the trajectory of the project, please get in touch with the appropriate moderation team. They’ll contact me or others on our official team through our dedicated chat channels on our server. We also have an #ideas-requests channel and an #app-bug-reports channel which should be used in those cases. 

And if you’re interested in getting more involved with Remarkist development, you can reach out to our @town mods about how to get a Town Hall memento, which will allow you to join our weekly Sunday Coffee Table Sessions hosted by me. You’ll be able to ask me any questions about the project there, and if I can answer, I will.

🌱 Growing Strong!

We are officially ready to start growing! 🌟 Let’s spread the word and invite like-minded creators and enthusiasts to join the fun and build extraordinary experiences and content together! 🚀

Bring friends to the party and earn sweet KRNL rewards! 🎁 Over the next week, we’ll add invite codes to everyone’s account in the Remarkist app. You’ll find them in your account’s Invite Friends section! 🎉

But before you consider using those invites willy-nilly, we think inviting folks to Discord first is wiser. With Discord’s asynchronous text-chat features, we can guide and explain things better to new members there. Then when they’re ready to take the next step into our app, guiding them through our onboarding steps will be much smoother.

You can use this easy custom Discord invite link to share with others who might be into the stuff we’re doing: 

http://discord.gg/remarkist 

Thanks for your epic support and enthusiasm! We're excited to unlock new possibilities and push creativity to the stars. Together, we'll make Remarkist a haven for all things remarkable in our beloved fandoms! ✨