Ahhhh, so that's the thing. There are lots of large poly communities but the small size of this one is actually one of the best parts about it. We can totally be warm and welcoming to a few people at a time and not disrupt the tiny community feel. An influx of people? nope, do not want.
Glad we’re having this convo. To make the idea work, as I was explaining to Kevin in our dms, is to use the discord as a way to start coming up with discord community regulations. Ultimately, it’s up to everyone what might be of interest, and we’re going to need to vote on topics like a code of conduct, what rooms are going to be created, how private rooms should be handled, and wether or not we should be making the sever public or private as some examples.
One of the biggest factors in determining who and what will be governing how many people we direct from the discord to here is all absolutely open for regulating. We just haven’t reached that point yet.
That’s why I want the discord to get set up originally as a way to model what we think might be a successful community before we even introduce it to anyone in any way. It would be unfortunate to put work and effort into building a community outlet only for it to cause problems, and modeling these things and voting on them is the only way, as I see it, to make healthy progress toward having it.
To your point, I agree. I wouldn’t want to see this site become any different than it already is. What I’d like to see happen is to expose the warmth and community into a larger and more dynamically accessible pool of people who could be recommended to join based on their interest in the warmth of the group if they felt they wanted that.
We can make rules that would ensure the safety and integrity of our users who choose to use the discord in such a way that doesn’t expose us to problems if we make the community and vote on the rules ourselves. For example, we could keep the server private and only hand out invite codes to polyamory.com forum users who express interest. We could do the opposite and invite people from other forums and force them to agree to a code of conduct before using the server. We could keep certain rooms private for just polyamory.com forum members.
It’s important to model these things and have a vote, is my main point.