Understanding the Remarkist Ecosystem
John takes members on a quick tour of all the apps, sites, and portals that make up the current Remarkist experience.
Ever since our earliest days, even back when this was just a simple Gilmore Girls watch party, one of the most common questions asked is, “what is what?” Some established members still ask the question. What app are we all supposed to have? What feeds are we supposed to be paying attention to? What is Remarkist? Is it an app, is it a Facebook group, is it a Discord server, or a community? And the short answer is… Remarkist is a lot of things. In fact, it’s all of those things… right now, at least.
As our initial watch series was coming to a close in the summer of 2021, I started on a new venture with a friend and fellow technologist, Sean Harding, along with other talented and passionate folks from the community. Our destination was a new kind of fandom product. One that doesn’t just feed fans content but brings them into the conversation. And over the past year and a half, we’ve been expanding what we found with that first watch into what I like to think of as a fan festival in your pocket. 🎉
I believe everything fans enjoy at the typical fandom convention can and should be easily accessible to millions around the world. And I’m not just talking about watching shows and movies with other enthusiasts, but all of the play that comes with brick-and-mortar conventions—the marketplace of beloved keepsakes from your travels there. The luminary talks with artists who still have deep memories to share. Cosplay. Competitions. Prizes. Discovery. Imagination. Creativity. A fandom wonderland. Led by fans. Not just fed to fans.
It’s a big vision, and it sails well past a small community of friends watching a show together. It also has a lot of moving parts. And while our eventual goal is to have all of those parts working seamlessly together in one place, our early days require other existing products that can approximate the full experience.
So this article will walk you through all the different tools 🛠 we’re using, how we’re using them, and why they’re essential… both in the short term and long term.
The Remarkist App
Our app began as a simple calendar 🗓 so that everyone could align their schedules with our watches. But those watch parties started to evolve into more than just watching a show. A kind of play started to grow out of our time together, and the app reflected that. We introduced digital collectibles and a game token to reward play and start building creative ideas together.
If you were at Remarkist in 2021, you likely remember our first version of the app. It was basically a mobile website. And we squeezed a lot out of that thing before the weight of thousands of transactions and collectibles rendered it practically useless.
But while that old app was breaking apart, Sean was building us a proper version that could eventually support that full vision. We’ve had it since late last spring in a beta version. It’s now available in both Google and Apple app stores. But we’re using it pretty much the way we have been since the beginning.
The Remarkist App still hosts the same collectibles game; the same schedule of community events, and it even includes an auction house where members buy and sell each others’ digital works. But the app’s most important purpose is actually something else.
We are building an index of media franchises. As we host events in the app and create collectibles, we’re actually building a foundation of fandom spaces, what we call Remarkist Worlds. You can think of them kind of like the hundreds of thousands of fandom wikis that exist at Fandom.com. Members of Fandom (formerly Wikia) built this vast network of wikis over a decade, and we’re doing the same with our Remarkist Worlds. Right now, our Worlds aren’t much. Each one features a simple schedule of its past and future events. But eventually, they’ll be much more. They’ll be mini marketplaces of creativity where both fans and artists of those franchises create content and products together.
So when you think of the Remarkist app, we certainly want you to think about Events, KRNL, Mementos, and Auctions… but consider that these are actually tools for founding and building fandom spaces. Rather than cataloging the lore of these media franchises the way it was done at Wikia, we’re filling them with experiences and keepsakes for each other. Doing so means our Worlds are more than just synopses of these stories. They’re commentary. They’re the sum of our ideas and remarks. They’re more than just monuments to Marvel, Harry Potter, and Gilmore Girls. They are virtual fandom homes inspired by those works.
Eventually, the app will be where we gather to watch content together. It’s where we’ll deliver ideas–from simple text chat all the way up to essays, podcasts, and perhaps even books. We’ll have forums within every Remarkist World, probably wikis too. The auction house, which is currently a centralized marketplace in the app, will be duplicated within every Remarkist World.
Our members have founded nearly 250 Remarkist Worlds since we started the app. And the events and collectibles that are being created in these early days are the foundations of those Worlds. In fact, the earliest Mementos of a World are precious for that reason alone.
Official Support Channels
While our app matures, we’ll be leaning on a few third-party products to give us the experience we expect to have all in one place eventually.
I get that it’s a pain to have to juggle and keep track of so many different platforms, but it won’t be forever, and I think understanding the purpose of each will make it easier to get their importance in these separate forms.
Discord
Discord is our primary community hub. And it actually serves two purposes.
Firstly, it’s a working space for Remarkist team members, employees, and associates of the company to build this product with the community at our side. It’s where anyone who would like to be more involved in development (or even just in the know) can get questions answered, make suggestions, and even help influence our direction.
Secondly, it’s where the community can enjoy the kind of rich text-based play and conversation that we don’t have in the app yet. We use it currently for Trivia add ons, we have a growing set of forums, we have channels there that remind community members of events starting or to harvest our KRNL token, and there are all kinds of silly rooms where people are just goofing around in the most hilarious and beautifully absurd ways. Check out our #memes channel to see what I mean. Or head over to our #bot-commands channel and type /cat or /dog or /pug. You’ll thank me for it. 😻
We chose Discord to serve these two needs simply because it has the largest set of tools to get the job done and because its features look a lot like what we imagine eventually having in the Remarkist app.
So Discord is where you’ll find me. As long as we’re using it, that’s where I’ll be actively working on the project. If you have any questions for me about anything related to Remarkist, Discord is the only thing you need. Joining our server there will give you a direct and private line to me. And at least in these early days, I’m very accessible there.
Clubhouse
We were using Clubhouse before the Remarkist app was even a thought. So it’s not surprising that many folks still think that Clubhouse is the main Remarkist app. It’s not. Clubhouse is where we host most of our events. We have a dedicated Remarkist Club there. And when a host schedules an event in the Remarkist app, a special team of community members will make sure to schedule a room on Clubhouse to match it. Our Remarkist app serves as the main schedule for our events, but the events themselves are usually hosted in a room on Clubhouse. 🗣
I say “usually” because we recently unveiled our own Audio Rooms inside the Remarkist app. Those rooms are very new, and we’re still working out kinks, but we are already starting to host several events in there. And eventually, we will host all of our events inside the Remarkist app. Clubhouse will likely be the first third-party tool that we retire, but for the time being, it’s a very important part of our current experience and a companion to the gameplay in our own app.
Substack
On January 1st, we completely rebranded our former blog as a fandom, community, and project-focused magazine we’re calling rmrk*st or Remarkist Magazine. Like Discord, it has multiple purposes for our project. For one, we can provide our current community with these kinds of articles–deeper insights into the platform. We think it’s an ideal educational tool for reporting on project developments, sharing new methods from the community, and talking through our fundamentals. We’ve published articles on our game token and our digital collectibles, and members should expect future subjects like design, storytelling, game strategy, and more.
The magazine is also being used as a broadcast tool for new members to find us. We believe the content we’re publishing–our pop culture content as well as project-specific pieces–will eventually find its way to folks with the same itch for fandom creativity that many of us have here. Bringing them in through a publication that both inspires and educates is the best way to welcome new members. You can support this particular use of the Magazine by helping us amplify the content through social media and email sharing–although the simplest way to help the magazine is to like our posts, which aids discovery in Substack’s own search tool. And if you didn’t know, the easiest way to like a post is right from inside the emailed issues we send you. It’s simple to do, and you don’t even need a Substack account.
And finally, the magazine is becoming a distribution tool for community creations. Mementos are a multi-faceted content type that allows all kinds of different formats, from art to games to writing. We want to share our community’s works with the world, and Substack allows us to broadcast ideas that would otherwise stay locked inside of our app.
Now, we do imagine that rmrk*st magazine will one day either move inside our app or be linked to our KRNL economy through integrations. But either way, we think Substack is a fantastic tool that is only becoming more helpful to the project as it matures. If you have your own Substack, we’d love to know so we can add you to our list of recommended newsletters there and even discuss working with you as a guest writer for an upcoming feature. Do you have an excellent idea for an article? Jot it down. We’ll soon be taking pitches.
remarkist.com
That’s our website. All projects need them. Ours gives you an overview of that bigger vision for the company. And it links you to all of the apps and channels listed in this article. It’s a pretty good one-stop brochure for the project and a portal that can quickly get you to anywhere in our ecosystem. 🌐
Our Official Social Channels
We’re only focusing on two social channels at the moment, both of which are being used for project amplification. 📣
Instagram
This is becoming an essential tool for drawing awareness to the project. If you’d like to keep your finger on the pulse of our brand, it’s the best of our socials to follow, especially if you’re not active on our Discord server. Most of our content there is playful, visual, and not very info heavy. We use it to occasionally drive people to rmrk*st Magazine where we can talk to them in a more meaningful way. We’ve used it to play trivia with the community through Stories. We’re starting to explore content that inspires creativity. And our focus with Instagram is to build a brand there that represents the heart of Remarkist. ❤️
Twitter
If Instagram is our social heart, then Twitter is becoming more of our social brain. 🧠 We’re using it to join discussions about fandom, speak to our community as a brand voice, and drum up conversations around hot topics happening both in and outside the community.
And Others
We also have a Facebook Page and a Tumblr, and we’re publishing on both. But we currently use them more as RSS feeds 📰 for rmrk*st Magazine and our Instagram to share our content on those platforms.
And that’s really the gist of our Remarkist ecosystem, currently. The whys, the wheres, and a bit of the hows. We imagine a lot of this will change, and as it does, we’ll let you know. Until then, we hope to see you around!
