I strongly suggest we should have a discord server, its 2023! instance chatting is so much more effective.
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Hi @Bao_Richard welcome to the community and happy Friday 
Thanks a lot for sharing your suggestion! We 100% appreciate your feedback and your enthusiasm for a Discord server.
Our forum is still fairly new, and we’re in the process of understanding the needs and preferences of our growing community. While we totally see the benefits of real-time chatting, we also want to highlight the advantages of asynchronous conversations that take place in a forum. They foster more comprehensive discussions, and the structured environment encourages deep, meaningful conversations that really get to the heart of the matter.
Generally, forums, offer a plethora of benefits. They serve as long-term repositories of information, can be customized to cater to the unique needs of each community and provide extensive integration capabilities. Not to mention, they play a vital role in SEO optimization and discoverability, making it easier for people to find and engage with our community content.
That being said, we appreciate your input and will certainly keep it in mind as we evolve.
Thanks for being a part of the conversation 
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I agree! A Discord group for Make is not only a great idea, it is inevitable in this day and age. I support this idea, and I am sure that many members from the Make community would be more than happy to volunteer as Moderators and OGs to run the chat room for Make, making it cheap and easy to run and maintain. It will also bring great value to the community members and allow Make to easily reach out to its members, while adding heaps of free publicity.
There was a Slack community before this forum. Although synchronous conversations feel more active, questions got asked multiple times every few months. So (valuable) information just got lost.
I do miss Slack as it felt it worked faster for a quick question and you could see if certain people where online. However now I’m also doing some searching first and we think about how to formulate questions more than just blurting them out in a single sentence.
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I think it’s nice to have a Discord server at this time.
We can impose a requirement for questions to be posted on the forum first before a question is allowed to be asked in the Discord server. This will allow the Q&A knowledgebase on this forum to continue to grow.
Discord can be used for more informal question-less discussions and pleasantries to take place, like a digital watercooler for Makers to hang out. Not only that Discord has built-in voice and screenshare capabilities, which can allow users to livestream or show off what they are currently building.
Join the Make unofficial Discord server!
The Slack community was only for Make partners not the wider community of Make-ers.
Discourse, the platform that powers this Make community, has a real-time chat option already built in that can be activated. The issue with chat is that the information and knowledge collected there is transitory and cannot easily be searched. I recognize people want to get help in real-time from each other but it can also turn into quite a noisy space and also detract from the focus on building critical mass in this community.
Have you ever noticed that a tiny minority of people on this community answer questions and a huge majority ask questions? Imagine what it would be like on chat? I think there would be even more questions and even less answers there since it takes TIME to answer most questions related to complex Make questions. And easy questions can easily be answered by searching the existing community.
I’m not necessarily against chat but I think for the subject matter it may not be the best choice unless it is for very focused smaller subgroups of the community.
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With the blessings of the community managers, I have started an unofficial Discord server, granting us fellow Makers a space to meet and chat in a more informal format.
Let’s see where this leads us, here’s the permanent invite link: