Jun 26, 2022
Building the next Discord — meet Discuna
Third-party channels, no notification mess, member rewards, earn money… sounds interesting? Continue reading! :)
One of my favourite ways to chat with friends and join community discussions must be Discord. Discord puts an end to countless group chats, sending and losing invitation links for video conferences, and hard-to-use online forums.
In Discord, you can simply create a “server” (a space for chat rooms) for your family, friends, study groups, class rooms, and other communities and add topic-based “channels” (chat rooms) to your server to organise discussions. The neat thing about Discord is that these channels can have different types: text, voice, and video. For example, you can add a video channel “Friday Game Nights” to your server instead of sharing a video-link each time you meet with your friends.
Now, imagine you were not limited to just text, voice, and video channels, but you could also, for example, add a document channel to your server to share comments directly inside documents such as PDFs, e-books, Wikipedia articles, etc. Or how about gaming channels to quickly join gaming sessions with your friends?
That’s our vision for Discuna! Discuna will host an app store with first- and third-party apps that you can add to your “community” (aka server in Discord). Unlock endless possibilities to stay connected and collaborate with your friends, team members, and communities!
If that sounds awesome, continue reading because our story just starts to unfold. If you are a Discord guru you might know that you can organise channels into categories but you cannot create sub-categories. This limitation is usually not a problem because most servers on Discord only have a few dozen channels. However, as Discuna introduces document channels, it makes sense that these channels can be structured in a similar way to traditional file systems — so, of course, in Discuna you can manage your channels with folders!
The ability to have different types of channels and organise them with folders is extremely powerful, but also presents a number of challenges. The biggest one was certainly the design of Discuna’s inbox but we found a very elegant solution! Most messengers, including Discord, inform you about new activities in a channel via notification badges that count the number of unread messages. In Discuna, we supercharged these notification badges to act as button through which you can open a pop-up that lists all new notifications from the corresponding channel. No need to open a channel to keep up to date with its activities. This feature is especially useful for channels that have longer loading times such as document-channels. Another cool feature is that these notifications are responsive: channels can react to notification events such as notification clicks similar to how mobile apps can handle notification context actions on Android and IOS. But the real elegance of Discuna’s inbox is that by design you can filter your notifications by community, folder, and channel. For example, clicking on a notification badge next to a folder opens a pop-up window that only displays the notifications of the channels contained in that folder.
One feature I really miss about Discord is a reward-system, especially for open communities. While you can get Likes for your posts, you can’t accumulate any rewards that reflect your long-term efforts. In Discuna, member rewards give recognition to your most active members and boost user engagement.
Finally, let’s talk about money! As a community owner, you may have to pay a fee for some channels you have added to your community. However, you don’t have to pay for these services alone! In Discuna, you can set up premium memberships to fund all of your community’s operating costs.
I hope this post got you excited about Discuna! Register now and start your own community for free! Or follow us on Medium to be informed as Discuna becomes more powerful!
We currently support group-chat, announcement, and PDF channels, but these channels are so cool that they deserve separate blog posts!
Find out more about Discuna on our website: www.discuna.com. You can also follow us on LinkedIn. Let us know your journey with Discuna @helloDiscuna!
