I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

Posted by dandano 6/28/2025

I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric(blog.danpetrolito.xyz)

601 points | 264 commentspage 3

subpixel 7/1/2025|

> 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 7/1/2025||

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 7/1/2025||

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 7/1/2025||

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 7/1/2025|

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 7/1/2025||

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dnrvs 7/1/2025||

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

mlok 7/1/2025||

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 :)

Leo-thorne 7/2/2025||

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.

ZeroCool2u 7/1/2025||

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 :)

aCodeCrafter 7/1/2025||

This is really interesting as a way to keep people connected on a regular basis. I wonder if something similar could be done for groups who aren't necessarily into gaming: like say a "virtual fireplace" where folks could just pop into a call and talk

mebizzle 7/1/2025|

Discord is already like that for a lot of niche communities and fandoms that aren't necessarily gaming; it just all evolved on a gaming-focused platform.

apps4datr2025 7/1/2025||

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fudged71 7/2/2025|

What I get from this is that Discord needs to make this notification able to be enabled.

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