Man, I haven't written a STEEMIT TIPS post in a few months. Sometimes I can't believe how things have progressed. I started PALnet 4 months ago and things have changed so much since then. Now I'm a top 20 witness. Now I have a new full time job. Now I'm hiring a team of people in a national field sales role. I think this is getting to the point where I'm back on an incredibly busy schedule. It's starting to feel like graduate school again. Anyway...
PALnet is the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network. It's a Discord community and I'm pretty sure we started June 1st. Ten days later I hosted an orientation to the place and a call for people to join the community. I recorded it. So, if you're interested in a little PALnet history you can view this:
Minnow Support Project
The Minnow Support Project is housed within the PALnet Discord server. MSP is a Witness run project to help Steemit grow and train and retain minnows on the platform. About a dozen publicly elected witnesses from Steemit contribute to or help run the Minnow Support Project. You can find some details about us on the minnowsupportproject.org website or on the 
One of the things I quickly realized about Steemit is that it's not just what you write, but who you know and who supports you. This place is as much about you as a person as it is about you as a writer. So, if you want to be successful you need a community around you. Minnows don't have a lot of power, influence, or know how about the platform when they first start, so I wanted to create something that you could hop into and join to learn some of that and then put it to good use as a community.
Discord
Since I made PALnet I've been sucked into Discord. Discord isn't just a chatroom. It's a community. It's an extremely powerful community. Steemit is many things and many of them are amazing, but it's not really a community. Yeah, we're all interacting on the block, but at best it's like being pen pals with someone. Discord is an internet worth of people available immediately 24/7 always ready to chat, hug, laugh, sing, talk, or build something together. You log in and you see friends. You can talk about your problems. I see rough stories of sexual abuse, physical abuse, marriage difficulty, heart ache, and financial problems. I also see uplifting stories of raises, new jobs, new friendships, and often times just people playing together.
What amazes me is that people will come in there and some just take one look and run screaming for the hills. But literally thousands of people come through there every month and share stories, friendship, and we're building something together.
It's pretty big
PALnet has just shy of 5,000 active members. These are people that have checked in within the last month and actually commented or interacted in our channel. WE BUILT SOMETHING FOR 5000 PEOPLE IN 4 MONTHS!!! That's staggering to me. Especially since we basically started with nothing but "Hey I should put this resteem contest on it's own page" and "I think it would be nice to have a place for folks to gather that like these values!"
Now we have 5,000 active people. A team of incredibly dedicated moderators to help things get going. Almost 600 delegations with a total nearing 200k SP. We have a streaming radio station. We have an RPC node. We've spun off a few successful new Discord rooms of our own. We have 3 of the top 20 witnesses who didn't get there until after they started working with the Minnow Support Project and we have several folks between 70-21 that are steadily growing their influence and stake weight on the platform.
All things considered. It's pretty amazing. So, I'm done right? NOPE!
Here's the thing. The world isn't fixed yet. The world is still largely at war. Most people are still impoverished. And the Orwellian spynet is bigger than ever with robotic enforcers coming. To that I say "Oh, hell no!" But 5,000 people isn't enough to overturn the current world order. We're gonna need more.
SIX THOUSAND
So, my next goal is 6,000 active people. That's 20% growth. I want to do it by the end of December. Rather than pawning this responsibility on anyone else. I'm gonna lead by example. I'm going to actively recruit more people and help grow the Discord channel. To facilitate this I'm going to host an orientation for PALnet tomorrow night before my radio show. My show is at 9pm EST (NYC time). So, I'm going to show up early at 8pm. I'm going to sit in a voice channel and welcome people, answer questions, and show folks around.
You get to learn about our people, our roles, our bots, our values, our process, and why it's a really great place to hang out. I'll show you the ropes. It doesn't cost anything. I'm not asking for anything. I'm just hoping that once you see what we're like you'll choose to spend time with us too.
So, here's the link to PALnet Discord Server: https://discord.gg/dpGVBcy. There are usually some 400-500 people online at any given moment, but I'm promising to be one of them at 8pm tomorrow night to welcome you to our community. I hope to see you there.