First, to set why we did this: in just a few weeks, the Treehouse community will be 2 years old.
I originally started it partially in response to the fact that the decimation of Freenode resulted in a lot of my social graph being across disparate networks. I wanted to solve that problem, so I met people where they already were: Discord.
Another side-note (because this is the Internet): I don't like Discord, but it is a means to an end. We have evaluated Matrix multiple times, including setting up Matrix infrastructure, and have found the tooling unsuitable for production service. Same with XMPP. People are already using it, anyway.
And so, we decided that this would be a good time to have an off-site, so that we could get as many people involved in making this thing happen in the same space talking about what we've built.
We wanted to answer questions like:
- What commitments can we reasonably make in the future with the staffing resources we have?
- Out of those, which commitments SHOULD we make?
- What is going well?
- What is not going well?
What is going well?
We have built a very active, and well-moderated community, which has presence across multiple channels (Discord, Mastodon). This community is meaningful to a lot of people.
We have made useful contributions to the tools we use to manage our community, such as the Mastodon +th patchset, which adds additional capabilities to Mastodon based on the observations of our moderation team.
For the most part, we are beating our moderation SLOs: on both platforms, abuse reports get handled frequently within minutes of being received.
