Amity

Amity

Maker

Co-founder and CEO of Amity here. Thanks @chrismessina for hunting us! Today, we're excited to launch Amity Communities, and share it with the Product Hunt community. Amity is a live communities platform that allows people around the world to come together to discover and discuss trending topics, breaking news, and live events — in real-time, for free. Join any community instantly or create your own in 60 seconds. We created Amity to give community creators back the power and control they’ve been waiting for. If you want to create an Amity community: 1. Download the app: https://amity.io/download 2. Create a community (claim your link) 3. Customize your community (choose live chat, posts, or both) 4. Share your link or QR code on social and with friends 5. Start interacting with live chat, posts, and comment threads. 6. Add countdown timers. 7. Pin posts and send push notifications to all your members anytime. P.S. Here's a Medium article on the story of Amity Communities: https://medium.com/@amityapp/int...

6yr ago

Edison Espinosa

like the idea! curious how long have you been working on this? Also, how is this different than slack or FB groups (I don't use FB, but I know someone might ask you lol)

6yr ago

Amity

Maker

@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.

6yr ago

Integromat

@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.

6yr ago

Amity

Maker

@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.

6yr ago

Integromat

@edisonjoao6871 @johnnychengx Agree totally. I don't like it as a community tool either.

6yr ago

Edison Espinosa

@johnnychengx Hey Johnny what happened with Amity?

6yr ago

Integromat

Congrats on the launch, looks interesting indeed. Besides the obvious Privacy concerns, what's the benefit of using Amity over Facebook Groups? Would love to be convinced that it can bring the same/better engagement levels! Cheers!

6yr ago

Amity

Maker

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.

6yr ago

Integromat

@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.

6yr ago

Amity

Maker

@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.