Around two weeks ago @asgarth contacted me to see if I'd be interested in giving some feedback on the Steempeak integration of Communities. I of course said yes, as I've been impatiently awaiting what they were going to do with them and today I'm excited to be able to share with you all some of the screens from the new version of Steempeak coming soon.
As you can see in the cover image, their communities page still matches in overall style with the rest of Steempeak, but has enough visual differentiation to know that you're on a Communities page. Just as you're used to with Steempeak, you will have multiple viewing options for you Community as well.
Accessing your Communities will be fast and easy because there is an ever present button on the top header to get to your Communities quickly.
Also the various new Feed options are integrated as well with you being able to access a Feed for people you're following as well as the Feed for Communities you're following.
There's also going to be great options for discovering Communities with a "Search" feature on the Communities explore page.
All in all, I think it's shaping up beautifully. I just want to say, it's been really awesome collaborating with the Steempeak peeps, @asgarth and @jarvie are obviously very passionate and diligent about their product and they are working meticulously behind the scenes to make Steempeak the best experience possible.
NOW, as a last little treat, I want to also share something that is NOT an official addition to the site, but rather an idea floating around that was one of my suggestions.
Discord Integration
So one of the features I suggested in the long long ago for tribes was to use one of the free Discord widgets out there to make their Discord Servers accessible on their frontends. I think this could be equally powerful with Communities as it allows the powerful tool that is Discord to be leveraged by Community owners in whatever way they see fit. If you want to use it for idle chit chat, a permanent place for helpful links, etc, whatever, you all know what Discord can be used for, but this allows your Discord to be discoverable on the site.
At this point as I said, it's just an idea. @asgarth is a beast and hooked it up within minutes, but there's definitely technical issues to work through to see if it makes sense on that end.
Beyond that though, I'd be super excited about this feature. As you all probably know by now, my entire philosophy when it comes to the design of Steem apps is user experience FIRST. I think making your app something that people want to use and solving problems for them is the way to attract and keep users. On Steem everyone is already using Discord anyway, why not keep them in app while they use it?
What do you all think about this?
Also what do you think about the new Steempeak? Are you excited yet??? Let me know in the comments!
YES. Please! I have not got that interested in communities because I have been waiting to see what marvels @asgarth and team have come up with. So excited about testing it. As for Discord integration I would LOVE to see that in action.
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I don't think you'll be disappointed ;)
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Nothing Steempeak has done has ever disappointed. I pretty much hero worship them.
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WOW, I cannot wait, been on the edge of my seat since beta.steemit.com launched. Always love the steempeak frontend for viewing my feed.
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Yup, me too . Really looking forward to it being released into the wild :)
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This looks real nice. I love steempeak. It's what I mainly use, but beta.steemit.com and communities are great. Being able to use these features there would be so cool. I like their integration of it so far. Looks nice.
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Me too, looking forward to everyone getting their hands on it.
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Look what we quickly and easily found when doing a communities feed search to see if anything was happening in the communities we follow
Also we're glad you and several others are looking forward to communities there's a lot even the basic implementation will do to improve the Steem experience. BUT... we're gonna go way beyond "basic"
We do have a few more things to do to catch up to the typical feature set of what steemit has provided in the backend of communities in the hivemind. But we'll be caught up and ready to go/share soon.
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Oh goodness SteemPeak, just casually keeping everything awesome O_O
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so i watch some online streams (mostly sports). and on some web pages there are chats, i just few weeks realised that some of them are discord (maybe more of them are they just don't look like it). So as you get to the web page you have a discord chat loaded for that streamer (some of them stream bunch of stuff all the time). you only get that room of the discord, nothing else.
It would be interesting that every community that has discord, when you get to that community you have a discord room for that community. Not sure is it clear what i wanted to say.
There is nothing live now, i could maybe take a screenshot tomorrow, but i am sure that you know what i mean.
EDIT:
I think i f-ed up, think it is a twitch chat
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Hopefully we find an open source option for integrating discord that isn't as buggy as the first one we tried which had some quirks that were a little rough.
But with that said I'd much rather see us make COMMUNITIES itself more of the STAR of the show instead of making discord the headliner. There's gonna be so much we can do with discord and so much a group can use that I'd hate to see everyone just defaulting back to old discord habbits.
I know steempeak will shift to doing much more in communities. Doesn't mean a chit-chat application like discord (or telegram or whatever the community chooses... like maybe @openseed discussions) will still have a place... because chit-chat real time discussions are always a nice thing but they get overused when there aren't other options. And that has been steem for a long time... all we seemed to have was Discord so it is presently being used for tons of things that community structure can do way better.
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this was going through my head while i was writing that comment. i could see people just chatting in discord while on community page.
I never got to deep to communities so i am not sure what can be done, so i will just wait and see :)
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Yes, I get what you mean and that's definitely the idea, only it would be a tab on your Community page vs right there on the side. It's still a pretty big question mark whether the plugins out there work well enough to integrate, but I'm hopeful.
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that side chat would be great. as you can browse the community and see who is chatting and chat live. but it is probably to much and maybe not possible :D
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Well I'm sure it's possible, I think it just might be too much of a design change for Steempeak. As people start creating their own frontends for their communities, they'll be able to arrange them however they want.
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very exciting times! I love steempeak but still havn't made it my primary steem surfer.....this might force the change!
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I think they're definitely leading the pack.
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Its mostly about exposure and having more people see your post, or making it easier to discover by being in a community of similar content.
For earnings it depends. Like I curate all posts of people who post in OnChainArt, which isnt much, but in a group ran by whales like OCD, it can make a big difference.
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Pretty great stuff! I can't wait for Communities, beta or not, to come along to Steempeak. I'd like to try them out myself on Steemit, but I personally prefer the interface that Steempeak has.
A quick question though, as you've much experience with Communities... What effect is there between posting on a particular Community, compared to just posting it on your own blog. I get that posting on Communities might get you better interaction, content discovery, and maybe viewership, but does it have an actual impact on say, earnings?
Also, I think your idea for Discord integration is a pretty great thought. I use Discord almost purely for Steem-related interactions, whether they're chatting with other Steem users, or sharing my posts for curation, and etc. So, it'll be great to see a Discord feature built right in.
Alternatively, if embedding Discord might prove too difficult, then perhaps we could have a page within the new Steem for sharing links/invites to Discord groups for particular Communities, and so on. Since Steemians have many Discord groups, but there is never a single source page to find them all, I think this could be a neat feature to help users discover other users :-)
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It should be noted: You can post to a community and re-steem to your homepage/blog.
Presently embedding discord is EASY ... however finding a non-buggy (and free) version of the embedding system may be tricky, but we've just started to look.
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Ah, so that's how that works, then. Thanks for the info. I haven't tried out Communities yet, although I'm getting more curious now. Any news on when Steempeak will get a beta on Communities, or is that accessible to the public already?
I hope that Discord integration, or some other form of chatting/instant-messaging feature will be added soon, since it'll be really helpful for interacting with other users and creators!
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If you're willing to give us some feedback find jarvie on discord he may get you access to try it out.
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Do you have a particular link to the Discord? Or is he part of a group? I've just tried out Communities for the first time on Steemit beta. Seems to work well, so far. Although I prefer to use Steempeak, since the UI here is much better than traditional Steemit.
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JARVIE#0711 on discord
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Cheers. I'll take a peek.
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Mentioned this a couple of years ago and think it would really make STEEM a better place if you could integrate discord into a community. It gives so many options for users to interact and adds to the whole experience. Hopefully they get it sorted out.
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