We’ve gotten a lot of new users over the past few days, and thought it would be good to make a post to help steer people in the right direction.

First of all, welcome!

You’re on discuss.online, which is a platform for, well, discussing things online! 😃

We’re a general-purpose forum hosted in the USA, and welcome casual and serious conversation alike about any topic you’re interested in. To start, here’s a thread that lists lots of active communities you can join (communities are like subreddits) that aren’t focused on politics, news, memes, or tech:

https://discuss.online/post/15026558

Go there, click on interesting communities (they start with !, like how /r/ works for subreddits). As an example, this post is in !announcements@discuss.online.

There’s a much wider universe of people that you can talk to and interact with on here! You’ve probably heard about the Fediverse, ActivityPub, and other stuff like that, but don’t sweat it. Start by finding your footing and finding some nice communities. Once you’ve done that, or if you’re interested in jumping right in, @otter@lemmy.ca wrote a great guide to how discuss.online gives you access to a wider world of other people here: https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/get-started

We also have a chat! Join us at #online.discuss:discuss.online if you want a more casual chatting experience.

If you need help, have questions, or just want to chat and don’t feel like joining the chat room above, feel free to post in the comments below!

  • OpenStarsEnglish
    4·
    4 days ago

    Wonderful!

    One suggestion: change !announcements to !announcements@discuss.online. The former does not work from every method of access i.e. some apps, while the second one always works.

    It’s so great that we can be so welcoming to new people coming in!:-)

    • m_fOPMAEnglish
      3·
      4 days ago

      Good call, updated. I didn’t want to lead off with talking about the Fediverse and keep things simple for anyone not familiar with it, but if there’s clients that don’t understand that, that probably just confuses and/or breaks things even more

      • OpenStarsEnglish
        3·
        4 days ago

        Good thought. Yeah and I don’t even know which ones but reportedly it’s the case. This will also get people used to the best practices that they can follow for all other future times when they want to write it on their own. They can handle it!

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    • m_fOPMAEnglish
      5·
      4 days ago

      Here’s the numbers since we enabled applications in January:

      Chart showing applications per day at discuss.online

      We’re obvious not going to overtake Reddit on user numbers anytime soon, but fairly impressive IMO for a site that requires an application to join. Almost everyone’s been approved. The few that weren’t were either obvious spam or they didn’t fill out the application properly, like just putting . in the text field instead of answering the questions.