Great talk by Victoria Chen at yesterday's meetup on onboarding. Her point that the first 48 hours decide whether a member stays really stuck with me.
Just finished moving our developer community off a chat app and onto its own network. Searchable threads, real profiles, and we own the archive. Should have done this a year ago.
If your community depends on a platform you don't control, you're one policy change away from starting over.
New experiment: pairing each new member with a buddy for their first month. Sign up below if you'd like to be a buddy.
Curious what everyone is running. We're on UNA with a Next.js frontend and a CDN for media. What about you?
For anyone self-hosting a community: put a CDN in front of your media files. Our page load times dropped by half.
Our community frontend is a Next.js app talking to a UNA backend. Deploys take a minute, and the API does the heavy lifting.
Maybe the best part of a headless setup: the web app and the mobile app share one backend, so members get the same experience everywhere.
Found lots of useful examples on unacms.com while setting up our member profiles and spaces. Worth a look if you're building a network.
Twenty years of community software experience shows. UNA has answers for things we didn't know we'd need: reports, moderation queues, privacy levels.
UNA on a small VPS, plus a managed database. Works well for about 2,000 members.
Forgot to mention: nightly backups to object storage.