@edisonjoao6871 We started development on the live communities part of our app at the start of the year. Slack is made for private teams of people who already know each other, rather than for public communities. Every time you join a new Slack group, you have to create a whole new account. Facebook Groups are asynchronous, while Amity Communities is synchronous (real-time). On Amity, people can interact with live chat as well as post threads. Amity admins can send push notifications, while FB groups have to compete with the feed.

@edisonjoao6871 @johnnychengx Don't mean to butt in but I'm part of several Slack groups which are built as communities around a topic and people don't really know each other from before.

@edisonjoao6871 @irhymeth Yep, not saying that people don't or can't use Slack for that purpose. Just saying that it was more designed for teams and work.

@johnnychengx Hey Johnny what happened with Amity?

Thanks @irhymeth! It's all real-time. You can customize your community — choose live chat only, posts only, or both. You can add customizations, like countdown timers, to the top of your community. If you're a community admin, you can pin posts and send a push notification to reach your entire audience anytime you want. This helps solve some of the fundamental reach problems people are having on traditional social networks like Facebook.

@johnnychengx Thanks for the response. While all those sound like awesome features, as far as engagement is concerned, do you think an Amity community will be able to drive the kind of engagement a Facebook group does. The biggest advantage of a group is that people need not download an app or sign up to a new service to join a community. How does Amity plan to combat that issue? I'd love to understand if Amity can become a replacement for Facebook communities as I spend a lot of time on those and the value is tremendous.

@irhymeth I think FB groups will have their place and will be good for the use cases it's made for. Amity doesn't need to replace everything. We'll look to be great for real-time events, live sports, content creators, trending discussions etc — and for those who want a new platform, a fresh start.

Thanks @weirdowizard. We’re excited to see what people do with the platform, too!

@andreas_zhou Thanks for the kind words!

Thanks @madebyildi! 1. The community link should direct users to the community inside the app since it has the optimized experience — or the App Store if they don't have the app. We might look at showing content previews on the mobile browser later. 2. Not yet, but it's on our roadmap to build embedded live chat for webpages :) 3. Coming soon too! A lot of people are excited about secret/exclusive communities and we're looking forward to bring out this feature. Why we created Amity as a communities network: We wanted to give anyone the power to tap a button to instantly access any conversation or community they're interested in around the world, on-demand. That's the magic we wanted to create for people.

@johnnychengx thanks for the reply. It will be interesting to see how you and the team grow the network. I think today if someone wanted to create/join a community, there are many platforms that offer different options (facebook, slack, reddit, discord, telegram, whatsapp etc). I really like your focus on live/on-demand conversations and would encourage you to further explore this area. Communities that already exists elsewhere may or may not switch over to Amity, it depends on which features suit their needs the most. However I think for those of us who want a new platform, a fresh start, we are looking to gain full control (or as much as possible) of our community/data. I continue to hear from friends who manage communities or are in the process of launching new ones, that they want to customize/own the full experience. The idea of creating a community under a network of other communities doesn't excite anymore, it doesn't sound exclusive, or unique, its being offered by many other platforms. But there is always room for improvement however and thats why i'm excited to see how Amity will progress from here. The "Free Bitcoin Race" is a cool offer btw, i'm keen to see what type of engagement it sparks.

@madebyildi thanks for the thoughtful perspective. Yes, we're looking forward to building the best platform we can for community creators and members!

Thanks @xyz_paul, I appreciate it!