As requested by @Karthikk, here’s a little guide on how I use a private discord server as a productivity tool.
A little Preamble
We had a bit of a discussion the other day as to why some folks prefer using discord over a forum like discourse. I can’t speak for everyone, but personally I am at or over my capacity for apps/social networks, so I like discord because it is an application that allows me to be involved in multiple communities at once
Discourse is flawed in my experience because there is no one single client to unite all my discourse forums (of which I have 18 now!). But my internet life started with reddit so that makes sense that I prefer a single client
Discord for Productivity
I came up with the idea of using Discord as a productivity tool when IFTTT recently cracked down on free tier users. I turned off most of my things there and hopped over to Zapier and Integromat, whuch are far superior to IFTTT. Once I got the hang of Zapier I noticed that there existed multiple Zaps that could be used with discord. This got me thinking.
The first step was to create my own private server, which is very easy to do. You just click this button
And then fill out things here.
I even made a little icon for my server in canva:
(b for my name and a bee for similar reasons!)
The next step was to sign up for Discord bots! I went to https://top.gg and just browsed through the list of bots, opening any that looked useful in a new tab.
The ones I settled on were (with their limitations in bold)
- Redditor for reddit: https://top.gg/bot/557580985646972928 (allows for following a maximum of 10 subreddits, or twenty if you login and vote for the app on top.gg. 20 was more than enough for me)
- TweetShift for twitter: https://top.gg/bot/713026372142104687 **(allows for the following of accounts, does not allow for the following of **
- Interstellar for astronomy pictures: https://top.gg/bot/707726135173054501
- MonitoRSS: https://github.com/synzen/MonitoRSS
in typing this post i’ve just noticed there are a couple of open source twitter bots that I might try instead: https://github.com/atomheartother/QTweet https://github.com/NNTin/discord-twitter-bot
I then set up several channels in discord
#twitter is for the twitter bot, which posts from useful subreddits like lifehacks, youshouldknow, buyitforlife, etc and looks like this
The RSS Feeds channel is largely used for a place for me to drop all the RSS feeds for academic CFPs (Call For Papers), this helps keeps things clean instead of cluttering up my email inbox. I might create other RSS channels for other things.
The twitter feed channel is for me to keep track of academics or people whose work I like on twitter without spending an hour every weekend going through those account pages. It looks like this:
I would really like to be able to follow hashtags (e.g. #LODLAM) but I have not found a bot for that yet.
Is anyone else using discord in a productive way? Have any good bot tips for me? Please do share!
this is next level ! Loving it !