Every time a conversation in our Discord becomes longer than a few gasps, someone would come and invite them to have it on Seed. We've been jokingly calling this "The Seed Police" 👮, and it's fair — we must be using our own tool as much as we can!
Nevertheless, seems like the Seed Police doesn't have a strict set of rules for what's OK to not have in Seed. This is an attempt to formalize those rules.
Private conversations, not meant for public eyes to see. This is the obvious one, because everything in Seed is public at the moment (yet).
Comments on bugs in Linear. This is a blurry one. Sometimes we do have these conversations in Seed, and it's OK. But if we have a bug in Linear — let's keep the conversation in there too. Or at least cross-link with Seed.
Casual chit-chat within the team, and the daily status updates in audio recordings.
Something that urgently needs real-time feedback.
Conversations with our current community members. This one is an obvious candidate to be in Seed actually. Until we can't run our own community in Seed — we can't ask that from other communities.
Stuff that you'd talk about standing around the water cooler if we were in the office. Something ephemeral.
A nice addition from Gabo H Beaumont: if you want me to do something — use Discord. If you want me to think about something — use Seed.
That last one is the tricky one.
I think Discord is our replacement for real-world conversations. If we were in a single office, we wouldn't need it, and everything else would be in Seed. But sometimes, stuff is just spontaneous, organic, casual, or nit-picky, and it just starts in Discord, so it continues there. Most probably it starts in Discord because of the points 1-5, and then sprawls into something bigger. But if it remains within the realm of the point 6 — it's OK for it to keep going in Discord.
After the fact, we can zoom out, and see if it's worth archiving the conversation in Seed for further reference, but we don't need the Seed Police to come in all the time to enforce it, because sometimes it's OK to have some ephemeral conversations — just like we'd have them in the real-world office.
Every team member is expected to be active and stay on top of 3 systems: Seed, Discord, and Linear.