Thanks a lot everyone for all your insights! I also found this article which definitively convinced me to use Discord: https://www.qovery.com/blog/why-we-moved-from-slack-to-discord

We use Slack for our community at Raycast. We work with developer and most of them use it for their internal communication already, including us. This makes it easy for everybody to set it up and stay in touch. That said, it works great for a smaller community <10k users. It isn't that good for bigger groups because it's not easy to find and preserve knowledge, e.g. new users ask the same questions and channels can become noisy.

I've worked with Spark AR's community before and saw how they grew from 0 to now more than 400k members. With such a scale, you find better and potential multiple ways to engage with your folks.

I hope that helps.

Here's an idea that might be too simple but that's worked for a smaller group so far: A Twitter DM group. There's a high chance everyone already has a Twitter account and the app installed on their phones, and with the standard Twitter length limitations things don't get too overwhelming. It's more of a chat group than a full community, but could be an easy option to start. Then if you end up wanting a more full-featured chat experience, Discord as you mentioned can be a good option since it's free (Slack's free plan can work well too, albeit with the 10k message history limit).

Otherwise, for a full standalone community, other discussions about communities on Capiche mentioned Tribe, Circle, Mighty Networks, and more as good options, though each would take more work to maintain.

We want to gather our community around a space from which can emerge sparkling ideas and topics.

Slack is cumbersome and you need to register to every instance. With Discord you just join the room. Plus a lot of people already have a Discord account. Furthermore, Discord announced it plans to shift their focus from gamers to broader audience. In other words, they realized they can compete with Slack or Microsoft Teams (Matrix.org, Rocket.chat, Zulip...).

A whole lot of Slack functionality can be replicated with Webhooks in Discord. That being said, Discord, Slack and other tools alike are primarily for chat. It might not fit your intended purpose.

You sound like you might need feedback hub. I would recommend something like nolt.io or if you want to self-host (and save money) you can spin up getfider.com.

Or try both, see what sticks. Cheers!

For a similar use case, I have been thinking going the open source and/or federated/decentralized route. I have been looking at rocket.chat and mattermost (open source alternatives to slack) and mastodon or matrix for federated options. There are definitely tons of interesting options out there...and I also have been "thinking" about Discord :-)

We use Slack for communication at Adspert. However, when we talk about "ideas, community, brainstorming", I would definitely suggest Discord. I subscribe many DC channel, business-related, non-business-related.

Can I just toss another idea in the ring? (And perhaps it's more down-the-road as you outgrow a platform like Slack) An owned community using a service like our Crowdstack community, or another one like Mighty, Circle, or Tribe, will give you more flexibility in a space that you have more control over.

Hey! A few recommendations here.
* If you're looking to build a fast-paced chat-style community, go for Discord or Slack
* If you're looking to engage users who already have accounts on Facebook or Reddit, go for one of those
* If you want an embeddable solution on your website, go for PeerBoard, the product we're building :)

We use Spike as our community platform. Its open-silo, so the fact that even non-spike users can communicate with you is a game changer when building a community from the ground up. It’s built right on top of your existing email and you can sign in from multiple email accounts that can either be displayed in a unify or separated form.

They have a great Groups and collaborative notes and tasks features so you can collaborate with teams right there on the app without having to use different apps for different contacts.

I hope this was helpful!