This week in community building — Issue 66

Let the others find you: share your weirdness to attract your people

‘Lean into loneliness like it is holding you’ – a poetic reflection on life in lockdown

From Aeon

The audiovisual poem How to Be Alone (2010) was a viral hit for the Canadian musician and poet Tanya Davis and the Canadian filmmaker Andrea Dorfman. Their sequel How to Be at Home updates the original for our age of COVID-19 lockdown, pairing Dorfman’s charming animations – a distinctive melding of stop-motion and illustration – with Davis’s lyrical musings on the isolation that she and much of the rest of the world has endured over the past eight months

The Loop: A community health indicator

The Overflow

As the number of users grows and we improve our site engine, the social aspect of the network becomes more complicated. With all this social complexity, the CM team must daily answer one simple question: Is the community healthy?

Owning your Community Platform with WordPress

By Hush Lashbrooke

In order to have full control over how your community interacts and to retain ownership over all the content your community produces, you need to host your community platform yourself, or at least the critical parts of it, in way that you grants you access to your members, content, and data. That sort of access may seem like an obvious need for any community manager, but it’s so easy to forsake when going for something hosted and pre-built.

Articles, links and podcasts

• Social Networking 2.0 — Stratchery
• Twitter Testing a New Way to Spark Engagement by Highlighting Things in Common with Other Users — Social Media Today
• Discord's screen sharing feature comes to smartphones — Engadget
• 160,000 Organizers: The 2020 Biden-Harris National Distributed Organizing Program — Nathan Rifkin
• The Ultimate Guide to Unbundling Reddit — Greg Isenberg
• How 100 True Fans Can Change Everything — Li Jin
• 2020 Reading List for Subscription Practicioners—Robbie Kellman Baxter
• TikTok Updates Community Guidelines and Safety Tools to Better Protect Vulnerable Users — Social Media Today
• We’re Never Going Back to the 1950s — The Atlantic
• Lonely people have a unique brain signature, perhaps due to so much imagined social contact — Pysch News Daily
• Who do we spend time with across our lifetime? — Our World Data
• The History of Loneliness — The New Yorker
• Community 2: A Community Manager Speaks Truth — Eat Sleep Work Repeat 🎧
• I disguised as an Instagram UX influencer for 4 months; this is what I learned about our community — Teisanu Tudor
• Moderating on Discord — Discord
• Zooming ahead? Not so fast! — Henry Mintzberg
• Using auto-moderation to improve community interactions — Flickr
• Quitting Communities, Choosing Platforms, and Developing Strategy with Sarah Hawk — Masters of Community 🎧
• Communities Should Create Paid Content — Ian Vanagas
• First, Understand The Company Goals — Mary Thengvall
• YANSS 194 – How memes, text messaging, emojis, and internet culture are expanding the range of human expression and, ultimately, our minds — You Are Not So Smart

🛠 Tools

• Ritual Design Kit — Interaction Foundry
• pe•ple - The Powerful Community Plugin for Startups Savannah — Empowering Community Managers
• Relay — Relay adds a live chat community to your website for free with just a script tag.
• Convodo — Talk to your users directly on your site
• Mightyboards — Start a job board for your community
• Comet — a toolbox for Slack and Discord community admins

🙌 Community of the week

• SameSide via Get Together podcast

🐦 Tweets