Is 'private community' an oxymoron?

In figuring out what the Decimal.Business membership should look like, one of the 'obvious' features was the private community. After all, everyone does it.

But it never sat right with me. It just feels wrong. It's not what Johnny.Decimal is; fundamentally not who I am. A week later and now I think it's really dumb. I made a bad decision, so I'm correcting it.

When you can't connect two people, you don't have 'community'

Earlier today I was chatting to someone over in private-business-world. And I wanted to connect them to someone in not-private-business world, because I thought they had a thing in common and they'd like to chat.

But when one of those people is behind a closed door, you can't do that. Discord even lets you know, by discouraging you from @mentioning someone who doesn't have access to the channel you're in. I thought this was a bug, until I realised what was going on.

At that instant I knew it had to end.

The intent

There was some logic in the original intent: which is that if you're not in business, you probably don't care about those conversations.

But this can be achieved in myriad other ways. Simplest of which is to mute those channels. So if that's you, here's how you do it.

Discord

1. Right-click the DECIMAL.BUSINESS folder in the left pane.
2. Select Mute Category > Until I turn it back on.

Forum

1. Select a category from the left pane.
2. At the top right of the right pane, click the bell.
3. Select Muted.

Business is still business

The other intent was to keep business stuff separate, so that it's easier to refer back to later. The channels don't need to be private to achieve this objective.

If it's not business, I'll steer it away

This is less relevant in Discord, where the chat nature of the platform really does see conversations just flowing by. I think worrying too much about which channel they're in is probably futile.

On the forum, which is more persistent, this is more important. Fortunately it's trivial to move an existing thread to another category, so if something starts in business but shouldn't really live there long-term, I'll just move it out.

Feeling robbed?

If 'the private community' was the primary reason you signed up, please accept my apologies and hit me up for a refund.

I've updated the website to reflect this change.