are.na -> discord thoughts
27 messages • Discord
- fjpaz
re: my private arena channels, another thing I often do is create a private channel with the same name as a public counterpart
I would vastly prefer arena to have some kind of mechanism to privately save blocks to public channels, so that I wouldn't need to do things like this
lots of my complaints/wishes for arena are like that; decisions made / actions presumably decided against for simplicity
which I can definitely respect, eg I imagine sander would have been a lot harder to build & ship without making those calls
this is what an average crosslink in my personal discord server looks like
I would be so happy if arena were to support crosslinking as well as discord does
especially with the are.na-y ui/ux affordances that I can imagine coming with that
- neoboy
One of the few instances of me using a private channel is actually this exact thing. Like I have a private version of the channel and a public version of the channel and the duplication is super annoying
I feel like the arena founders resistance to implementing users feedback as it comes up is part of why arena has sustained itself so wholly, and why it’s annoying to use at times. As annoying as it can be, it’s a continually refreshing differentiator to basically all the other software I use. Love it or hate it, it’s a massively strong signal against the majority of software dev. Like, people continually come to them with ideas and they continually shrug it off, while at the same time promoting people to build whatever they want, whether it gets integrated or not
Tbh I've never seen someone use discord like you do! Why don't you use something like obsidian instead?
- fjpaz
I actually only just recently started using an obsidian-like system a few months ago, after about a year of the discord + arena combo
it slots in to fill a very different need vs the ones satisfied by each other
I deeply appreciate the affordances modern chat apps offer for expressing and arranging text
mirroring human conversation in many ways while also beating it handily in others
text and, crucially, images
mostly screenshots
no syncing issues / considerations
mobile support is also top tier (except for being online-only)
it’s actually a very rich interface with many features vs obsidian
every message is a markdown buffer, like a little file
each has a permalink that you can copy-paste elsewhere to link, like a manual version of obsidian backlinks
after using arena (which itself is very manual) for a while, the migration felt pretty natural
and discord totally beat arena in many of these respects; I mainly just use arena for collecting & archiving now
^ all of the above could have been a note, but the flow is just not the same in a document; this is closer to how I think naturally more of the time
also I text my friends like this (in large barrages of thoughts) a lot, and i learned that it’s a lot to manage as the recipient
discord serves as a really good personal outlet for thoughts, ideas and certain types of saved material, like tweets (which embed much better on discord vs arena), to compound and compound
a lot (though def not all) of my once-active private arena channels have been replaced with discord threads in my server’s
#threadschannel

