Hey all! It’s time to chat about remote worker communities again.

I’ve spent the past 24 hours joining dozens of new Slack communities thanks to a nifty new tool called Hamster Pad. (If you’re desperate for an invite, bug me!)

The reason Hamster Pad is so awesome is that Slack admins connect their community directly to the app, meaning all users need to do is click a button to get their invite. This lets people bypass forms like my signup form for Online Careerists (this means the paid communities and people only trolling for mailing list signups probably won’t join Hamster Pad).

Meanwhile, plenty of thriving communities have already joined Hamster Pad, and it’s now so easy to join them. I’ve added Online Careerists to the bunch, and there have been massive influxes in all the groups I’ve explored (thanks to Hamster Pad appearing on Product Hunt, Tech Crunch and Lifehacker in the past day). I expect we’ll see some new blood soon, if you’re feeling chatty. Don’t forget to set up your notifications in Slack and to grab the apps.

Hamster Pad also lets you see how many people are in the community and how many are currently active. And it separates the communities you’ve already joined and showcases a bunch of trending communities for you.

Why are these communities important? Well, for remote workers, these are our lifelines. This is where you can ask other freelancers what tools they use, share niche-related news, get a second pair of eyes on some buggy code, or ask how much people charge. They let you whine about awful clients in the privacy of a community who completely understands. And they give you some people to chat to about random daily stuff, since there’s no water cooler chat in your remote office.

One of the articles I curated for this week’s Online Careerist publication was on this exact train of thought. You are not an island.

And so why am I telling you all this stuff about Hamster Pad? Well, I’m hoping it will bring many of these Slack communities back to life. So, so many of them have been quite dead for ages and it’s because Slack just isn’t that sticky. In the meantime, we still have the Facebook Group. See you there or in Slack!