convoclips

Published May 4, 2021 Last updated May 6, 2023 Edit Source

I like discord. I spend a lot of time on it and decreased my time on other social media. When I talk, I generally know who I’m talking to. It is also very customizable. Servers can be how the community wants them to work. In March, amreio had an event called ‘Kimo’ where artists draw every day for a month. If for any reason someone missed posting a new drawing for a day, they will be kicked out of the server. It is a good way to motivate people to keep drawing.

A thought came about the ones who got kicked out. They are missing a lot of fun conversations happening on the server. Some are giving very good tips and they wouldn’t be able to learn from it. More people should see the convos. That’s when I had an idea to make a way to make discord conversations shareable.

If such a thing existed, it would also be cool to see a snippet of conversation from art celebrities like Steven Zapata, Ahmed Aldoori, and Moderndayjames. What are they talking about? Not that I want to know everything, I just want the highlights. Maybe they gave some really good critiques to each other that I could learn from, that would be awesome. Whether it will be useful or not, I decided to build it.

It’s been a while since I built something people will use. The last one I build was startref.io and it’s not good. I want this project to be my best one yet. The past year was all art, so I wasn’t able to use my coding skills. This will be an opportunity to change that and for me to improve them. The first step was to get myself familiar with the tools I would like to use for this project.

As a user, I will type /clip first-message-id last-message-id to clip a conversation. See it on a website, and be able to share it. I want to see other people’s clips, be able to search by tags. I can assign a role to some members of my server so they will be able to clip messages. When there is a clipped conversation I don’t want to be public, I can delete it. The project has three parts. A webapp/website, server, and a discord bot.

Most of my webapps are built with React. I’m bored with it. Svelte had some buzz while I was learning art, so I looked into it. It is nice to work with. The documentation is nice, and the interactive tutorial is very helpful to go through. Learn anytime without having to set up a dev environment. I think it’s easier to use than React. That might be because I already have some experience, it’s relative.

For the backend, I’ll use Firebase since I’m already familiar with it, and seems there are no new solutions that can compete with it. Rust was the language I wanted to use. Unfortunately, I didn’t find a good library to work with firebase. It would have been nice to use Rust so I would learn more about it. The development will be slow, but it’s a good trade-off. Rust has a good library to work with Discord API, but I think it better to keep languages the same for the projects’ backend. I’ll save Rust for another project.

Currently, it is functional enough for testing with real users. I’m sharing it with some friends for feedback. It would be ideal for someone with a sizeable server to test it. The goal is to know if I made a useful thing. It’s far from being done, but I’ll continue working on it if I know some people find it useful.