Most Popular Topics on Decent Diaspora

People frequently ask what the conversations on the Decent-owners-only "Diaspora" forum are like.

Today I created a new subforum of "Most Popular Topics" and moved those over.

This makes it a lot easier for the occasional reader to pop in, see what the BIG topics are, and pop out.

I'm sharing with you the first two screens of "Top topics" so you can see what the Diaspora conversations are about. I've blurred out names for confidentiality. Feel free to ask for more info about a topic, if you're curious.

-john

How we're handling worldwide direct messaging

Social media platforms mostly attach themselves to one phone and one computer, which makes it very challenging for a company to participate. This system basically locks you into having a single "corporate mobile phone" that gets handed around each time someone's "shift" comes up. It also makes it impossible to escalate questions to the right person to answer it, if the question requires specialist knowledge, or if the message is not in English.

We've been using https://sproutsocial.com/ to give us a "single inbox" to Facebook/Instagram/Twitter as that was the best available tool five years ago. It allows several people to login, but has no concept of assignment, escalation, threading, and doesn't do Whatsapp, Wechat or Instagram DM (just Instagram comments).

We switched yesterday to https://respond.io/ as it supports Whatsapp, Wechat, Telegram and Instagram DM, and has threads and escalation. Within minutes, a message in Korean came in via Instagram, which previously we had no way of handling. Another one in Chinese via Whatsapp from Taiwan, and one in English from Norway. I really like having a manual "close this conversation" button, so that we make sure we don't lose track of conversations among all the daily noise.

Getting Whatsapp, Twitter and Telegram working is not so simple. Whatsapp and Telegram require dedicated (not available via mobile phone) accounts to work with respond.io so this week we'll set those up. And Twitter's API requires you to apply for permission. Hopefully that'll all be completed this week.

I'm not 100% in love with respond.io. Automation is the biggest lack. Most of the Instagram DMs we get are "emoticon responses" to our posts, or "Story mentions" and we don't want those creating conversations we have to manually close. I'd also like messages not in English to be auto assigned to my employee speaking that language: respond.io automatically determines the language, so it could do this.

Nonetheless, respond.io is a BIG step forward for us. We previously would frequently lose conversations inside Instagram, because 20 more messages would arrive an hour later, and there was no way for us to see which DMs we'd replied to, and which not. This solves that problem.

-john

Starting soon! We will continue the series with Paul Chan Paul and DennisHew DennisHew going through the descale process. While we are demonstrating the descale process we will also touch upon other areas that will require some attention like the Thimble and the Water Tank. As usual we will go into the reason why we should look after it and also what happens if you don't.

We will look closely at ways we can quicken up the process and how descale is done on other commercial machines and how often you will do descale.

Feel free to ask questions during the zoom. We will pick them up from the chat and answer them in good time. Or if you feel confident hijack the microphone to ask or show us on your DE1 for direct feedback.

If you missed last weeks zoom you can find it below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mhu345TWGw

See you all then!

______________________________________________

Time of Zoom call:
https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/ ... 152&p6=214

- London, UK, Sun 12th Sept 2021 - 10am-12pm
- Berlin, DE, Sun 12th Sept 2021 - 11am-1pm
- Riyadh, SA RUH, Sun 12th Sept 2021 12pm-2pm
- Melbourne, MEL, Sun 12th Sept 2021 7pm-9pm

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89748058159?p ... VUSE8rUT09

Meeting ID: 897 4805 8159
Passcode: 211914

John or anyone from the Decent Espresso team,

I know you've stated in your videos that Decent machines are typically upgradable. I'm looking at picking up a DE1XL, but torn about the increase capabilities of the DE1XXL. If I decide in the future that I do indeed want the extra steam capabilities of the XXL could I possible buy the necessary parts from you and do the upgrade myself?

Second, any word yet what the differences are going to be between v1.43 machines and v1.5(next) ? I saw a part in the group head is changing, but nothing else. Is it too early to know the diff list between the revisions?

The XL/XXL upgrade is a big one, lots of things change, and it's dangerous to do if you're not an engineer (high voltage), so no, it's not field-upgradable. Sorry!

As to v1.5, we're working on a "next gen" machine for 2 to 3 years from now, but it'll be quite a bit more expensive. Otherwise, we're on v1.4x for at least 2 years, as we've ordered parts for that now. Due to COVID, innovation takes a back burner to getting parts in.

-john

We take a break from the maintenance series and look deeper into the world of steaming and milk drinks with Paul Chan and Dennis Hew. We will go through a few details of what defines certain drinks in a region and how to steam different milk types like Oat, Almond and Soy as well.

As usual you can join and ask questions or even join in on camera!

Paul will be the student this week as he dusts off his jugs to hone his milk based drinks with guidance from Dennis.

If you missed last weeks zoom on Descaling you can find it below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB_Ts6ySNKA

Countries covered: Asia, US and Australia.

________________________________________

Time of Zoom call:
https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/ ... 179&p4=224

- San Francisco, CA, USA - Fri, 17th Sept 2021 - 18:00
- New York, NY, USA - Fri, 17th Sept 2021 - 21:00
- Melbourne, Australia - Sat, 18th Sept 2021 - 11:00
- Hong Kong Time - Sat, 18th Sept 2021 - 09:00

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84474245010?p ... REaXUzdz09

Meeting ID: 844 7424 5010
Passcode: 026494

See you all then!

Join us in 10 minutes as we take a break from the maintenance series and look deeper into the world of steaming and milk drinks with Paul Chan and Dennis Hew. We will go through a few details of what defines certain drinks in a region and how to steam different milk types like Oat, Almond and Soy as well.

As usual you can join and ask questions or even join in on camera!

Paul will be the student this week as he dusts off his jugs to hone his milk based drinks.

If you missed last weeks zoom you can find it below:
Countries covered: Asia, US and Australia.

______________________________________________


Time of Zoom call:
https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/ ... 179&p4=224

- San Francisco, CA, USA - Fri, 17th Sept 2021 - 18:00
- New York, NY, USA - Fri, 17th Sept 2021 - 21:00
- Melbourne, Australia - Sat, 18th Sept 2021 - 11:00
- Hong Kong Time - Sat, 18th Sept 2021 - 09:00

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84474245010?p ... REaXUzdz09

Meeting ID: 844 7424 5010
Passcode: 026494

See you all then!

New video: DE1XL v1.43 unboxing

We've started shipping the v1.43 model of our DE1XL espresso machine, so we made a new unboxing video to go with it.

Here's a 1 minute Instagram-worthy short version of it, that shows the highlights:


The full 10 minute version is here, and is automatically emailed to customers when we ship their machine to them:
I watched all the previous unboxing videos and comments/criticism of them, namely "you forgot to mention"... and that's why this is a bit on the longer side, as I attempted to not forget anything vital. I know that people hate manuals, but having just spent $4000 or more, spending 10 minutes to learn the essentials is probably worthwhile. We have a DE1PRO version of this video, which we'll launch when we start making v1.43 DE1PRO models, likely in November.

Next week, we'll do a "what's new in v1.43" video. However, so much of what's new in the past year has been software (and backward compatible to v1.0 machines) that the video will be more of a "what's new since our previous v1.42 version launched in January"

-john

Sprometheus's video about Rao's Allongé on Decent and LMLM

Quite a nice video about Scott Rao's Allongé, which "Sprometheus" decided to make. He borrowed a DE1, and compares the taste to his Linea Mini version of the Allongé.

-john

Starting soon! Paul Chan and Dennis Hew will be continuing the topic of steaming milk and letting you guys in on how we use the Realtime flow rate calibration while steaming with the Decent App. How does it affect your milk and when to use it? We spill the hacks and tricks we have learnt behind the bar so you can use them at home.

We will also compare different steamwand tips that we pair with the DE1 and how they affect your milk before we reveal the new prototype tip we have been working on.

If you missed lasts weeks zoom you can find the link below!
_____________________________________________

Time of Zoom call:
https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/ ... =214&p5=37

- London, UK, Sat 25th Sept 2021 - 9am-11pm
- Berlin, DE, Sat 25th Sept 2021 - 10am-12pm
- Riyadh, SA RUH, Sat 25th Sept 2021 11am-1pm
- Melbourne, MEL, Sat 25th Sept 2021 6pm-8pm

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88500745833?p ... krcHp0Zz09

Meeting ID: 885 0074 5833
Passcode: 615152