Finally, I'm playing around on beta.steempeak.com in the new communities section. I have given up looking at Steem communities as I just don't play on Steemit - Steempeak has always been my front end of choice. If you're not there, you should be. Why?

An easy wallet system where you can even delegate, view SBI and more
You can view payouts in tokens on your favourite tribe
You can organise users into categories - eg I can group all my friends under one tag to find them easily
You can draft, create templates and more
You can easily set post beneficiaries and schedule posts.
Now, on beta, you can join communities and select which communities you want to post from.

Steempeak moves so fast on listening to people's request and adapting to suit the needs of Steemians that I'm well aware by the time I post this later today, some of these observations might be redundant, changed or acted upon. You're welcome to review the site yourself - simply log in with your keys at beta.steempeak.com.

Oh My God - Discord Visible on Steempeak!

This is huge. I easily followed the steps (okay, with a little assurance and confirmation from Hive account@asgarth - cheers!) to enable Disord on the site. I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about this BUT it means that you don't have to download Discord to chat in the server and can do it straight from Discord! This means that anyone new to the community can easily see what scintillating conversations might be happening within our server. :P

There's still a few things I need to get clear in my head:

Is it possible to only allow delegators to view the Discord, or chosen community members, rather than a free for all?
What are the real benefits of having Discord on site - Discord folk are going to have their Discord app, surely, rendering this superfluous?
Will people use it if it's not monetised?

More Observations Within Communities - Notes and Queries

I can view my communities Feed as opposed to my ordinary feed
As a tribe owner I can easily change the settings, add mods, and give member roles to who I choose
I can mute members - amazing!
I can sort the 'view' - one new viewing option is to organise the posts by photos. This would be amazing for a photo-visual art community!
I can see any new activities within the tribe, such as subscribers
I can choose to post from my blog or just within the community which I presume will be visible to only community members. I'm still a bit confused with how this syncs across all the front ends and Steemit itself, so I haven't tested that yet on my blog.
I can easily see what the community is about, and who the admins/mods might be from the ABOUT tab. As a tribe owner I'd also like to be able to see people who we've selected as members eg delegators.
The top bar helps me see how many members there are - I'd like to be able to click on that and see an instant list of members that I can sort from there. My instinct is to click on the numbers on that image bar.
I'm not sure what the 'pending rewards' is about - is that for the community, for natural medicine, for all as a whole?
Most importantly - if I post in 'communities' to the community and NOT my blog - does it appear on other front ends? I imagine this is the case until Steemit and Steempeak come out of Beta. Until then, I'm still not sure I'm that excited about communities as posting just to community members is really what we're all after.
I'm also not sure about what will happen if I post to the community within the same 24 hour window in terms of autovotes. Say a user gets one upvote a day via Steemauto. Does that count posts in communities as WELL as posts within a blog, as that would screw things up a bit. I'd like them to be counted separately as they would have very different functions - eg a community post might be a quick announcement or a query or a forum, rather than a more lengthy and well produced blog.

Tags within Communities

One of the most common requests in our community is a way to archive, sort or search posts. Some kind of search function would be amazing or a sorting via tag within the community (perhaps the same thing). Only this morning someone was asking for anyone who's written a 'how to make soap' post they could read - searching for it is a nightmare.

Thus, I could use #naturalmedicine and #herbalism more happily on my posts. Most people will use tags that will be seen by tribes for extra rewards - #herbalism is an extra tag that could count for outside SEO/interest and thus should be used. To find posts related to #herbalism and sort in that way would be incredible.

Another search feature which would be useful is to search for a specific user within the community.

Tribes V. Communities

It did occur to me as I was playing around today that new users - or even many old ones - might not really get the difference between 'tribes' and 'communities' as these words are used interchangeably outside Steem.

Perhaps a small explanation is necessary - something like 'View posts through Tribe pages to see your rewards in tokens specific to each Tribe'. I find myself having to explain this a lot to people.