Not a fan of this idea to be honest. A Discord server just makes relevant information harder to find for outsiders (a Google search won’t bring you to a discord chat for instance). Any relevant discussion could be had here anyway.
Isn’t it more important to keep this forum healthy instead or splitting the community on two platforms?
we’ve been talking about it the forum should still be the place for questions and troubleshooting to document useful information for other users, but discord still has its value for meeting people and making LVGL more user friendly
I do agree that is a bit like a Pandoras box and there are risks. But I also see the value in a more informal and faster paced communication channel. Discord is the default choice and certainly appeals a lot more to younger people than older ones, but maybe it’s a net win? But what do you do, if the experiment fails and you don’t like it? I don’t know… Just deleting the server is most likely not an option…
Moderation needs to be on top of this… People that do that will have to be timed out/removed with no mercy. Good moderation is a damn tricky thing to get right, but I also can’t predict how bad it will get in an LVGL Discord with mostly motivated and technical people…
If something goes wrong, I don’t think deleting the server would be a problem if everyone gets warned before it happens and understands why it happened. We can also direct people to the forum so that we don’t lose many users. Additionally, there’s always a chance of creating a bot for the Discord server that manages creating LVGL forum questions on Discord and syncing them.
Discord has some really powerfull API
Regarding the job promotion: We need to do it carefully. As LVGL LLC we are doing services and work related to LVGL and I wouldn’t like to build up a place for our competitors 
I don’t say it’s not possible but we need to think about it.
In general: I’m still also not sure. The possible issues are:
Do you know other potential issues?
i dont know any other potential inssues but most of these could be “fixed” using the discord API to sync with the LVGL forum (also sync the accounts)
theres bots for less complicated moderations like spam / badwords and almost everything you can do in discord can be ruled diferently in each chat/call based in role hierarchy and theres also bots for giving automatic roles for people when they join
if we cant draw a clear line from the discord amd the forum support then we dont need to this means creating a discord bot where you can create a chat/forum post using the discord and the conversation would be in both discord and LVGL forum
if all those ideas where done properly probably would get a lot of interest
to be realistic this forum and discord has very similar UI elements like the reactions that could be synced to Discord
This seems like an awful lot of work to set up and maintain a quite complex Discord bot just to sync the forum to Discord and for it to probably still be quite janky… And I would imagine, that it’s just read-only there, since you cannot post in this forum without an account. Which begs the question: Why not just use the forum directly?
This can’t be the solution. What is the real motivation for Discord? What value is created for LVGL with being Discord? Just being “user friendly” is obviously not true without proper staff engagement, which seems to be impossible at the moment.
I’ve collected some references:
Graphics related:
I found only QT, no GTK, Unity, or TouchGFX. Even QT has a quite small community. MidJouney is a beast but it’s main platform is Discord.
Programming languages
JS is very small, Python is reasonable.
Operating system
Both are smaller than they should be:
Games
A lot of users for popular “geek” games. But there is no pubg, GTA, Elden Ring
Manufaturers
No ST, NXP, ESP.
Others
FireShip creates amazing web dev videos on YouTube and also sell tutorials. The subscribers can talk on Discord so it’s not really organic. ~10k memebers for 2.3 million YouTube scruibers
Funny YouTube channel that I watch (5.5M YouTube subscribers)
Seeing this I’m not convinced to be honest.
Qt is using their server for support too. If they could get 350 online users and 2-3k in total in >3 years, realistically we can target 30 active and max 300 total in 2-3 years. 4k online for Arduino, the maker paradise is also very few.
Fireship or VLDL has 1% Discord users of their YouTube subscribers.
Speaking about the marketing value, if we used the same effort to get more newsletter subscribers or LinkedIn followers probably we achieve more.
I still understand the need for a nice place to chat and gather, but it feels to me not Discord is the right place for us. Maybe we could organize some targeted events with some concept or topic.
Remember the conversation we had about getting a dedicated server for the hosting. adding a real time chat wouldn’t be that hard to do. It could be tied into the forum front end to look like it was part of the forum to the extent of using the same usernames and passwords. Not that complicated to do.
It seems the Forum has a built in chat plugin: Discourse Chat - plugin - Discourse Meta
I’ve just enabled it. Maybe you need to refresh the site with Ctrl+F5 and you will see the chat icon here:
Does it work for you?
