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Posted by dandano 7 days ago

I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric(blog.danpetrolito.xyz)
596 points | 264 commentspage 3
subpixel 4 days ago|
> it was a life savior when my little one was a newborn to jump onto Discord for even 5 minutes to chat with my friends, watch someone play a game and then log off for another diaper change

I'm afraid I can't relate to this at all. I may a bit older and/or I may have less close friends but I prefer a very different kind of social contact that is more like make plans, meet up, rinse and repeat.

Back in the AIM/ORC days I loathed being pinged all the time for chit chat - this system reminds me of that!

flooo 3 days ago||
I have several chat groups with friends and even with my wife to avoid this topic. With my wife, I have several now: one to share recipes, one to share the weeks meal plan, one to talk about the activities of our two year old and one to share houses we might be interested in buying.

It’s great to separate for record keeping, but mostly to avoid forcing the conversation on some organisational thing when the other just needs eg to vent about something at work

unethical_ban 4 days ago||
It seems to me a common enough use case that it should be built into discord.

I think the "I am here, now" alert does more than the "hey who is around?" message.

m-hodges 4 days ago||
This is great. For years I’ve been wanting to solve the “link problem” in my Signal group. My friends post a ton of great links that get lost in the scrollback and I’d love a way to get just a dedicated queue. I’ve thought about things like a private subreddit or even just a different link group; but everything just felt like moving the problem and change management. Great to see this type of solution worked for you!
Imustaskforhelp 4 days ago|
I think Signal should just create a pin option like how discord and a lot of others have.

But in the meantime if I had to genuinely suggest a method without any friction if you are okay with using code like the author did, then I'd suggest something and lemme know what you think

Why don't you just create a special emoji that would only be used for the purposes of Pin, like (Oh the irony), and then have a signal cli or signal-bot https://github.com/signal-bot/signal-bot where you could do something like /pins and it would show the pins but you would need a different mobile number or account for that and honestly just a big hassle. I could think of other ways but we would never reach the native User experience that signal could provide if it would allow pin natively

EDIT: Even a more simpler way could be if we could just search the chat emojis and we could just search <the pin emoji> and it would show it

Also I am surprised that HN doesn't allow emojis

apps4datr2025 4 days ago||
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dnrvs 4 days ago||
i built the same thing (though only the notifier, not all the stat tracking) for my friend group back in 2017 when PUBG came out and we were trying to play together as often as we could. can confirm it worked great.

i eventually moved the bot to glitch.com (rip) where we could collaborate on it and it evolved into a monster of in jokes and utilities. it's going offline this week unless i can find the time to migrate it off glitch

Leo-thorne 3 days ago||
I really like this idea, especially the music quiz and birthday reminder. I've been wanting to build a bot for my friend group that shows up now and then when things go quiet, just to gently remind us of something warm. It doesn’t interrupt anyone, but quietly adds a bit of connection to the group.
mlok 4 days ago||
There is a very weird display bug on this site : when I access it in lanscape horizontal position, with my iPhone 8 on Brave or Safari : all the text is trembling, unable to settle on a size. Trapped in a resizing loop. If I rotate the phone verically it settles properly and then also horizontally. But if I reload the page (horizontally) it goes nuts again :)
ZeroCool2u 4 days ago||
I have a similar friend group that hangs out on discord now due to the post college diaspora and we even use a Signal group chat. However, it sounds like it's a smaller group, because we've taken to literally sending bat signal gifs into the chat when someone gets online and it works well enough for us :)
fudged71 3 days ago||
What I get from this is that Discord needs to make this notification able to be enabled.
socalgal2 4 days ago|
I’m confused about what this solution does. I’d expect that as people move to discord all the message spam that was happening in signal would just eventually move over to discord as people got used to communicating there instead of signal
demaga 3 days ago||
It encourages people to speak rather than type.

You don't get hundreds of messages per day by writing in email style. You get there if you have a lot of synchronous or near-synchronous communication in chat. It's kind of obvious that voice call suits this better, but there is friction involved in making an actual call.

Discord voice channel might reduce the friction if you make this culture of hopping in and out of it.

anigbrowl 3 days ago||
If you don't care about Security/Privacy, Discord has a great UI and is probably significantly better for free-flowing group conversations
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