On the eleventh of April, around 18,000 people were Isekai’d.
With the recent meta of closed discords in order to build hype, the team behind Isekai Meta decided to do things the other way. They fully opened their server to the public after a month of carefully building and solidifying their core community members. They were meticulous in looking for people that will make up the foundations of their community.
The team summoned early believers of the project and people who, the team believed, will be able to help them ascend to the next level. They, also, ingeniously hid invite codes in their early tweets that rewarded eagle-eyed followers.
Isekai Meta created a closed environment where these early individuals were able to form genuine bonds with each other. These were the seeds that developed into the foundation of the Isekai community today.
In less than twenty four hours, the server went from having just 1,800 (core) members to almost 20,000.
A fair chance to everyone
Do your own research — this is something that is constantly preached to newcomers entering the NFT space. Lately it has become a bit of a conundrum though. How can one properly do research when projects have their Discords closed to the public? People outside these closed servers have no clear way of communicating with the dev teams. This heavily hinders someone who wants to learn more about the project, the people behind it, and their roadmap. Questions asked in Twitter can easily get buried by hundreds of other tweets.
Isekai Meta knows that Discord is the best place for the people to immerse themselves into the project — through asking questions, reading up on the latest announcements, or just by simply hanging out with the team and the core community that they have cultivated. This removes the need to grind for invites in Twitter and gives everyone a fair chance to better know Isekai Meta.
The frontliners
With the Discord being open to the public, it is unavoidable that bad actors will be able to snake their way in. Keeping the server, and its members, safe and vibing are Isekai Meta’s hardworking community team. This team is composed of Titoo, Nova, and Oni (the community team), and their twelve moderators — Acoll, BankaiSauce, Bubble, Ehtan, JpegJohn, Kyou, pl, Roxy Migurdia, Belle, IppoHanma, Yii, and Lochnessy.
They have the unenviable task of keeping an eye on each channel, helping newcomers navigate the server, answering questions regarding the team and the project, engaging with members, making sure that everyone’s adhering to the values of Isekai Meta, and keeping the community safe from bad actors. Now, that is a lot of work! This community team, though, is doing one heck of an amazing job at it.
Isekai Meta went above and beyond to further protect their members. The team took a page from Azuki and developed their own Discord bot instead of utilizing a third party one. This ensures that they have full control of their bot and can easily make the necessary adjustments when needed.
The art of slowing down
The team knows that opening their server to the public is a step in the right direction, but they are also aware of its adverse effect in slowing down. With the team fully committed to sticking to their ethos, they implemented several ways to help their members achieve this.
The team consistently spends time in their Discord, listening and acknowledging community feedback, in order to know how to act accordingly. They made the necessary adjustments (like placing general chat in a one minute slow mode) to ensure the level of engagement is manageable.
They also created two new roles that will separate their core members from the public: the Genchijin (for the core community) and the Ippanjin (for everyone else). Genchijin’s will have access to a separate channel where they can retreat to when the general chat becomes too fast.
The Isekai Meta team still partially closes their Discord once a week to force their members to slow down and live life outside of the NFT space.
Decentralized community building
Genchijin is not just a fancy Discord role; they are also given the responsibility, by the team, to further grow the Isekai Meta community.
The core members are tasked with curating the community, either from the Discord (Ippanjins) or from Twitter, and nominating the ones they believe can add value to the project. These nominees will be evaluated by the mods and given out to the admin team (Titoo, Nova, Oni, and Kairu). Once approved, they will ascend as new Genchijins. It is important to note that the majority of their Summon List will come from the pool of Genchijins.
This is an innovative way of community building — one where the community is formed in a non-biased direction. From the team handpicking core members (centralized), to giving them the power (decentralized).
We only planted the seed, and we intend to encourage the core members we confidently chose to do the same, ultimately laying out a strong and steady foundation of community building — the decentralized way. I truly believe the Isekai community will progress by continuously developing through collective means. (Sayres)
Community building is not just about increasing in number, but also nurturing the relationships developed within. One way the team does this is by introducing the weekly community board. It is a cool way to highlight fun interactions within the server; shining the spotlight on the members and the relationships being formed with each other.
They have also created a cool collage they called the Art Board that showcased the many fanarts made by their followers.
Moving Forward
One of Isekai Meta’s goal, before they drop, is to summon their members into a fun and safe space. They want to continuously improve on the Discord experience of their members by having several events planned in the coming weeks: movie nights, sticker contests, and talent shows to name a few. They also have a weekly podcast, hosted by their mods, that talks about everything related to NFTs.
Remember: Being Isekai’d is only the beginning of your journey.