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Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

discord.com

249 pointsbluetidepro230 comments

Are they searchable and indexable? What made PHPBB and all that cool was that it'd turn up in search queries. As a hobbyist, this was an incredible wealth of information for me that has mostly dried up with the advent of walled gardens like slack, discord, etc.

Some might point at BBS and IRC and say that those were the same, but I'd argue that they had lower volume, and less rich media, and I'd go one further to say that newsgroups were well indexed and searchable. We are in a 'dark decade' of lost history search-wise in some hobby communities.

There is talk about allowing public/discoverable servers to be indexed.

I don't know when those plans might materialize, but it is very much top of mind for us that there is ever growing knowledge on Discord that isn't accessible via search indexes.

This would be a huge boost in adoption!

But how would it rank on google? At first there would be few to any links to content from discord.

That sounds like Google's problem?

I imagine they'd figure it out pretty quickly given the size and popularity of discord.

I think with the amount of internal linking and original content it would start to rank pretty quickly. At least if the scrape algorithm makes any sense at all.

I'm already coming across more and more communities who say "For more information/to download the example files/to see our FAQ just join our Discord!", which is an immediate turnoff. I'm not going to "join a discord" just to see an FAQ or download some prerelease build or something else.

Now even entire communities are going to move onto Discord and become completely unreachable for people like me who don't want to "join the community" just to read one post that one person wrote one time.

I also feel that "just" is very much an understatement when it means "sign up for a service that doesn't play nice with anonymous networks (Tor) and often requires to share and verify your phone number".

I'm hugely relieved that you see the black box as a situation to be addressed. For me, that circumstance alone turns Discord from a neat and useful tool into a tragedy that I'm forced to live with, and I'd love to see it move into the former category

Hopefully distinct from mere searchability: how about integrating a wiki service for big/boosted servers?

Apt association I'd never made before. Communication in discord does have similar traits as communication in IRC.

IRC is indexed via passive bots. I can still go back and search my old IRC user names in popular search engines and find messages I sent 15 years ago.

Discourse vs Discord

Not PhpBB

mehh, I'd rather use PHPBB-like forums instead of Discourse.

Knowledge being accessible via search engines is the main reason we are sticking to a real 'forum' vs the new Discord feature (despite having a very large Discord community).

There is a lot of sophistication needed for managing a forum so it could mean that this Discord feature is meant to address a different need.

I've run a forum and worked on a couple of others. First one was for lactose intolerance when there was very little information available. Others were technical sites. In that case more information became easily available and in others, it's moved to platforms like facebook and twitter.

I do mourn the loss of these forums as there was a lot of good information, and more importantly some first hand experience in some of the posts. A lot of these things now are view or click driven so they lose the personality. While there are still a lot of good forum sites around and do well, I think the rise of spam posts and increasing work of moderating the smaller sights was too high and eventually killed them off.

It's important for a forum to be both externally searchable and internally. A lot of the old forums had internal search tools that really sucked, and external search engines didn't seem to cover everything.

On the modern internet, I don't know that being searchable and indexed is always a benefit.

I like the idea of a semi-private space. I don't want people on the internet to be able to drudge up out of context statements I made 10 years ago by googling "site:discord.com <my discord name>". I can tell a lot of people are the same way just by their behavior; the discussion that happens on Discord is a lot different than anything on, say, HN or Reddit, and certainly Facebook or LinkedIn.

People are a lot more open when they're not worried about being watched. Discussion that happens on public forums usually sounds like everyone's at a job interview getting scrutinized by a potential employer. Which, in fairness, they effectively are.

> I don't want people on the internet to be able to drudge up out of context statements I made 10 years ago by googling "site:discord.com <my discord name>".

We’ve had public and private forums - or more often, private sub-forums within larger public forums - forever. I don’t see why you can’t achieve the same separation on Discord, as long as they allow admins to explicitly set indexability(?) for each channel.

That seems reasonable enough technically, but I doubt it would work out that way in practice. Most users would probably treat all Discord channels alike. Those who don't understand the setup would carry on as they always had, many of those who do would find it easier to treat all alike (if for no other reason than that the setting could always change).

I'm fine with only privacy-conscious people getting privacy.

Privacy should be the default so that people who go for privacy don't stick out.

Sorry, my comment was overly brief and flippant. I see this change as a net positive for privacy, and the fact that it's of only limited benefit for people who are less scrupulous about privacy is unfortunate but I am still pleased on the balance.

> Those who don't understand the setup would carry on as they always had, many of those who do would find it easier to treat all alike

This is exactly what used to happen on “legacy” forums, too. I’m all for reasonable guardrails[1] but at some point you have to just let people take some individual responsibility.

1. Alert users who are posting publicly, allow them to disable posting to public channels in their account settings, etc.

Right, they are. Choosing to communicate on a private platform such as Discord, rather than something public like Twitter or Reddits is exercising that responsibility.

> Choosing to communicate on a private platform such as Discord, rather than something public like Twitter or Reddits is exercising that responsibility.

I find it difficult to believe that people choose Discord over eg Reddit because they value privacy - you can create a private subreddit much more easily than you can create a new Discord instance. People choose Discord because they want live chat that works.

Anyone who is consciously choosing Discord for privacy reasons shouldn’t have a problem policing themselves when it comes to public vs. private channels, no?

I think people chose Discord because they want a private place to chat with friends.

Users aren't nearly as stupid as most technical people think they are.

What they are is ignorant, which is not the same thing.

The solution to this problem is to have a very clear indicator on each channel that it's public or private. If you really want to, make it a link that explains what that means.

And you're done.

This is a problem in the same way that copy/paste is a problem. There are well-known solutions, it's just modern software that went to crap, not the users.

> Discussion that happens on public forums usually sounds like everyone's at a job interview getting scrutinized by a potential employer. Which, in fairness, they effectively are.

Maybe if you use forums with a real name policy? I wouldn't give prospective employers all my nicknames :)

Unfortunately there are whole services offered to find said nicknames and tie the crap back to your real name. Frequently used for high profile job positions and their “background” checks.

Oh really?? First I've heard of it, I wasn't aware of that. That is indeed worrying. Do you have any examples? Would be good to try out. To see how much it knows about me.

Also time to start rotating identities more :) It's a bit more complicated not to mix them up now because almost every email service requires a phone number and I only have so many (here in Spain you can't just buy a prepaid sim over the counter, they have this annoying registration process with photo ID that also has to be renewed every once in a while).

It’s a service offered through LinkedIn for corporate accounts. One of my former bosses was able to do a crazy level of snooping into my private life.

They also were able to contact an advertising firm with it and get most of my Facebook activity. I had some albums with my drinking exploits (young and just out of college) and my boss could see it all even though he wasn’t friends with me and that info wasn’t public.

He told me all of this a few weeks into the job. It was shocking just how much info he could pull on me by just being corporate and asking the right people and paying some cash/using a background check.

Thanks, too bad it's corp accounts only so I can't try it :( I wasn't aware of this, I will be more careful in the future and start cleaning up some nicks (starting with this one).

What could be a greater way to start a professional relationship than some cyberstalking... /s

> I wouldn't give prospective employers all my nicknames :)

I wouldn't give them any, to be honest.

And it weirds me out to see people posting with their real names, be it youtube comments or on niche forums. That anonymity is a deeply held thing to me, I guess.

Some employers like to see their employees participating in online forums around their particular field of expertise. Mine also, though I've declined to do so for now.

I wholeheartedly agreed. Ironically, I already feel that Discord is a lot less private than IRC used to be. In a way, history not being accessible to those not currently in a channel is also a feature.

Scrollback is actually a permission that you can disable; but it's on by default and I've never seen someone turn it off.

Disabling it doesn't really work right. It doesn't let you still see history from when you joined; it just lets you see whatever bits of history your client has cached, which resets anytime you restart the client (on desktop) or anytime the client loses state due to memory pressure (on Android, no idea about iOS.) It doesn't really make much sense.

I guess the desktop behavior kind of matches IRC, but it's not what Discord users expect; the mobile behavior is just random, since you can't control when the client is "connected" or not.

So it's really just IRC mode?

No, it's quite a bit less functional than IRC. Even just switching between channels on the same server doesn't reliably retain chat history, so it basically just doesn't work at all for anything but write-only channels.

Doesn't it? I'd argue that this is a perfectly reasonable outcome. Server-side history is disabled -- for everyone. Sure, you could have saved the conversation when you saw it, but it doesn't do it for you.

Ephemerality can be desirable. However, I do agree there should ideally be three options, including the one you're describing.

That's a good point and now that you mention it I remember seeing that option. But as you say, it's almost always on, so it barely matters.

To be clear, I'm not saying Discord or any server admin are making a mistake here, scrollback is often very useful. But I've definitely opted not to share some things because I knew they would be searchable ultimately. Having witnessed the transition of some IRC channels to Discord, I dare say others must have felt something similar.

im in a few servers with it off and it works really poorly. even switching between channels in same session, especially on web will instantly clear it, they seem to struggle with session management

That's where the anonymity comes in. Why the hell would you use any personally identifiable info? Just use mjr69420.

It's this ability to find random comments on obscure stuff that really made me love the Internet.

Nowadays, the social media stuff, and frankly, the influx of idiots, has turned into garbage. Their thoughts should still be archived and searchable though.

If you post on a public Discord, I think you are accepting that your comments will be made public. I totally agree with you on private Discords though.

Have you considered simply not using a username that ties back to your real identity? I absolutely do not understand this need people have nowadays with associating their identity and personal information with online aliases and then complaining when people find it. Discord even allows using multiple accounts on the same client now.

> Have you considered simply not using a username that ties back to your real identity?

I assumed it's been Internet 101 for several years now. To the point I don't remember when I used my real name on the Internet. And whenever I do, it must be a really important and a well thought-out reason.

Moreover, I use a different nickname for every service so that if someone looks up dvfjsdhgfv they will only find HN and HN-related posts.

>I assumed it's been Internet 101 for several years now.

people can be extremely naïve.

It has also been a problem with people who make content on platforms like Onlyfans. A lot of them learned a bit too late that it's a bad idea to take pictures that show the street where you live.

>it's a bad idea to take pictures that show the street where you live

Reading this it just hit me that GeoGuessr is basically doxxer training.

In the 90s we were taught, never give out your name, your age, where you live, or anything that can be tied back to you.

And then came LinkedIn that asked for full access to your inbox (yes, username and password! and people gave it away), Facebook with their "real name policy" (and people complied!), Android with automatic access to your contacts without your consent (I believe they fixed it at some point though) and so on. Everything seems upside down.

This is not really practical without good opsec because of the risk of doxxing. You basically need to have strong discipline to censor out every information that could remotely be traced back to you. The doxxer need to succeed to id you only once; you need to protect yourself on all and every comment you make.

Take a look at my comment history. Can you figure out who am I? I worry constantly about this.

I was targeted once in a politically motivated witchhunt on Reddit (that also targeted other moderators of a national subreddit), and there were a doxxing pastebin that circulated in hate groups. It contained the real name, addresses, id number, etc of many moderators; a lot of them had made a conscious effort to not leak anything, but they could be traced nonetheless.

In my username it had "none information could be found". But I later checked out my comment history on reddit and found out plenty of information leaks; people were just not determined enough to comb out the comments.

For something like Discord, I'm eventually going to form human connections with people. I'm not going to post my address and SSN, obviously, but my real name, my occupation, the company I work for? Yeah, that'll probably come up.

To say "just practice good opsec and never tie your name to your real identity" is the same as saying "just don't make friends on Discord" to me. I understand why people would do that, but I really don't like the idea of being a pseudonymous blur on the internet like I am on HN/reddit.

> People are a lot more open when they're not worried about being watched.

I have some bad news for you.

Are you implying strong believes do not provide adequate protection from pervasive, non discriminate surveillance?

people don't think it be like it is, but it do

(1) Most forums are pseudo anonymous. You happen to be on one right now.

> People are a lot more open when they're not worried about being watched.

(2) This is a very "techie" take. Facebook has proven most people don't care about their privacy. Note - not saying privacy ISN'T an issue per se, I'm just saying that we've already proven the general population really doesn't care.

(3) AVS Forums, Tesla Forums, Malibu boat owners, etc. are all forums I regularly use and have great indexed content that would easily get lost in a Discord server. Also, no one knows who I am there. So as long as YOU want to stay pseudo anonymous while still contributing...you most certainly can.

This kind of reminds me of Facebook back in the day. You had a space that was sort of private-ish, in the sense that people had to sign up and you could set things so that only friends/friends-of-friends would see your posts. But in the end, even if you try to be private, your friends-of-friends network is eventually infiltrated and scraped.

Semi-private in the long term is public. It makes sense -- the platforms want us to feel comfortable and over-share, but this is because they are on the surveillance capitalist team, not because they are benevolent.

> the discussion that happens on Discord is a lot different than anything on, say, HN or Reddit, and certainly Facebook or LinkedIn.

but plenty of it isn't, the growth of larger discord guilds necessarily changes that. discord has led to a net-loss for information sharing within the fighting game community, for example. join a half-dozen guilds, one for each game, your local group (and the local Smash scene doesn't hang out on the same guild as the anime fighters, etc etc), etc, and there's no way to search for questions across them, so everyone joins and has to interact with some bot to address FAQs or annoy the "regulars" or get shuffled off to some other chat room with its own anti-spam verification bot and its own document index and its own culture. you have to hope that folks have pinned messages to google docs you can still access with information about character matchups, frame data, etc ... and figuring out which/who to connect with to learn a new game is basically difficult to solve in this decentralized fashion after years of forums and wikis like shoryuken disappearing to be replaced with adhoc un-indexed chat rooms and google docs.

> On the modern internet, I don't know that being searchable and indexed is always a benefit.

Not everything has to be so, but the things we cant search & find on the internet are of vastly less value to humanity. Being isolated apart & alone has some advantages, but endurance visibility maintenance & use is an incomparable advantage that is hot & trendy to take & counter on.

All in all the cases of most of us getting found & wrecked for past shit has been enormously vastly overblown, especially for not-obviously-shitty takes (which i definitely think we need to create permission & space to allow & amemd over time!!! without going full fuck-off turtle mode to greater reality). Anti-democracy fearmongering- the fear to speak (and the fear of more fearmongers using out-of-context low-brow anti-signalling-polarization-ammunition)- like most fears- sells, gets those eyeballs, captivates our imagination & holds our horror-sense. But what an overblown sad conservatism, what a unforunate & sad retinence to have tacits socially let in the door of our collective mind, so rarely a real issue.

The thing about reddit and facebook is they are fundamentally stream based systems. Whats at the top is tied deeply to freshness, anything else falls off. Judging so shortly, saying they are deficient may be perhaps true, but this structurality seems like the cause for war to me, not the public-ness of these mediums.

Alternative ways of collecting & gathering for longer term is exactly what we need. To me the participatory versus private debate is largely orthogonal. There's some influence yes. Leave it to the users I say; lets see which communities thrive in private versus which figure out how to tap the public world to see & let's revisit in a dozen years, see whose gotten world.

Just my own voice, here (in public, on a short temporal horizon site), but: a discord that keeps itself private, exclusive, denies the world & never ever grows the capability to permit real public engagement... is an abhorrent aborational monster deserving quick fate (or to adapt & make a public conscious possible).

> People are a lot more open when they're not worried about being watched.

I have bad news for you.

As long as you're leaving unencrypted info on other peoples computers you're being watched.

This info can and will be used against you should someone in the right position feels like that.

Only proper end-to-end encryption (combined with plausible deniability where required) can protect you from that, iff of course you're in full control of the keys at any given time.

In any other circumstance there is no privacy on the internet. You're being watched, as the internet became the ultimate surveillance machine by now.

Since Snowden this—since a long time actually quite obvious—fact can't be talked away even by the most ignorant people.

The only sane way to deal with this given reality is to consider just everything done on the internet, where no very special protection measures have been applied to, to be compromised. As you're being watched you better behave like you're being watched. There is no other option, sad as it is.

Btw. in the days of the yore everybody knew that you never ever put any personal info on the internet. This was one of the first things you told people before you showed them how to use a news server.

But today people seem to act without due consideration about just nothing on the net.

For example people today hand out happily credit card info to more or less whoever asks, and than wonder that they get robed. I actually still remember the times when people were saying that it's extremely unlikely that anybody could do business on the internet because "Who would be so stupid to type in their name, address, and credit card number into some form on a 'webpage'? Trusting someone on the internet, LOL!".

Now the trust goes even so far that most people really think that there are "private spaces" on the web, where they're not watched. Well, LOL.

I totally agree - I find myself missing the Google discussions filter (if you remember what that was?) very often. It would let you search only across forums, message boards, and other places where actual discussions where taking place (as opposed to SEO and blog spam).

I actually built a small tool for myself to try and replicate this. It searches across a few discords, a curated index of forums and message boards, and a little bit of Twitter (while applying some advance parameters to filter out the marketing spam). Works pretty well!

If anyone else wants to give it a go (desktop only for now): https://crew-rho.vercel.app

(the forum search takes a little bit of time to load, but you'll see it if you scroll down)

PHPBB:Reddit::AIM:Discord

The name of the app is Discord for crying out loud. Have you seen the kinds of things people are using it for? Discord is *wildly* hackable chat, not forum software. There's tons of crap being slung around on Discord that doesn't deserve to be archived because that's not the purpose.

Is IRC indexable or searchable? No. Usenet served that purpose. People hacked in query bots to IRC. At least Discord comes with built in search.

If you want a forum, go use forum software.

Sure, but the problem is that so many communities are moving discussion around solving domain-specific problems to Discord. And the collective wealth of knowledge - some of which gets accumulated across decades - instead becomes an amnesiac experience where answering one person’s question provides no gain to the next person with the same question in a year’s time.

I’m not sure why this move is happening.

Exactly. This is a people problem not a software problem.

>If you want a forum, go use forum software.

Boy have I got some news for you about what Discord just announced. You should check out the link on the post you're commenting on!

Searchable? Yes. Indexable? Absolutely not.

Even public servers are only public to human accounts and only server admins are allowed to invite bots. If you try to scrape Discord with a human account you will be banned.

That's AIcist :D

But really, you can't tell human accounts from bots.

With a sophisticated enough crawler, sure, but that would require a significant amount of R&D. I don't know of any organization that both has the resources to do that, is willing to break Discord's ToS and make their index public.

Given what I've heard about people getting banned for "self-bots"[0] they seem to err more on the "ban humans that look too bot-like" side of that dilemma.

That being said, while there is some overlap between the two, it's not terribly difficult to detect specific things that bots would want to do, such as scrape a Discord channel, and ban any human accounts that match that profile. A regular human is going to be sending lots of messages and querying message history only rarely; a bot is going to hit the message history API as quickly as the rate limits allow and never send a single message.

Browser fingerprinting could also be used to sus out bots that don't look like a web browser enough. Most bot developers are just making HTTP requests rather than firing up a real browser and attaching to it with WebDriver[1]. Once you do that then you have to play walls-and-ladders[2] with the Discord user-interface team. Oops, your bot just clicked on the fake invisible "please ban me immediately" button that we snuck in right next to the link that opens #general! Oops, we decided to obfuscate all message content so that incoming message JSON is unreadable and outgoing HTML requires having your specific Discord CSS loaded to view it!

Just as there's unlimited ways to disguise a bot as a human, there's also unlimited ways to unmask them or frustrate them while remaining usable for human users. Turing completeness is a harsh mistress, and scrapers only work because people find economic value in being scraped - not that scrapers have an inherent advantage.

[0] Scraping your own Discord client token and using it to authenticate a Discord bot with your own account

[1] Writing a WebExtension content script to inject input into a browser would also work to self-bot

[2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20120117-00/?p=85...

I created https://sqwok.im because I wanted an open, indexable, public chat site tailored to kitchen-table conversations, influenced from my years growing up on IRC.

There's been an active discussion on whether to allow gifs/images in the chat, with many saying they like that it's focused just on conversation.

I wonder why information-heavy communities chose "knowledge storage" in the form of Discord.

Example: i'm looking to build a PrintNC - they've got a really good Wiki, however with all the options i'm a tiny bit overwhelmed, especially since for newcomers like me, there's so much to wrap my head around...

Anyways, if i could look up the answers to my questions very probably someone has asked before on a forum, i wouldn't have to join their Discord and use the (imho) subpar search to maybe find what i was looking for...

So yeah, those kind of communities would be (again, IMHO) better served if they'd use a forum - especially since that knowledge also would be indexed by search engines.

People do it because Discord has a fundamentally better UX. It's bad for long term archival and the like, but it is an earth-shatteringly better UX than with traditional forum engines.

It's not actually that much better. It's mostly chat + sugar (aka good branding and emotes)

Is there someone offering decent forum hosting for free?

Seems so - although forums also seem to gravitate towards slightly more self-hosted than Discord. Which is a feature in a way - own the domain and build something real.

Discord basically won because of style over substance. I use it plenty because I don't have a choice. But there's nothing actually good about it besides the VC money they poured into going to market and branding.

>Discord basically won because of style over substance. I use it plenty because I don't have a choice.

This is incredibly reductive. You don't use it because "you don't have a choice", you use it because it's the best. If there was another option out there people would use it. There are plenty of choices out there; you go set up a self-hosted phpBB forum; try to maintain a live community on there; and moderate it. Or forget phpBB, try Discourse.

When you say Discord is "Style over substance" you willfully ignore all the downsides about forums that caused people to migrate to Discord/Slack in the first place. We will never have robust forum software as long as people continue to believe that the reason Discord is as popular is it is is because of "VC marketing dollars".

> This is incredibly reductive. You don't use it because "you don't have a choice", you use it because it's the best.

Not always. I hate discord with a passion because I don't want to be data mined by some corporate walled garden. Unfortunately some open source projects have taken the decision to use it so I have to in order to communicate with them. Home Assistant being the most notable one for me.

It's a really poor choice for this IMO, matrix is so much better and you can use any client you want.

In my experience when I see an open-source community use something like Zulip, Glitter, Matrix, or Slack it seems inactive relative to an equivalent hypothetical Discord community. I think this outweighs the privacy concerns.

Discord's biggest advantage in my eyes is that it makes it easy to build a critical mass of users. This makes it easy for newcomers to get answers to questions quickly.

It doesn't. You are the one heavily devaluating the need of privacy.

>I hate discord with a passion because I don't want to be data mined by some corporate walled garden.

So your disdain for discord has nothing to do with user experience, ease of use, UI, or anything else someone might consider when actually using the product, but it has to do with the ethics of the hosting company.

I can say I hate Porsche because they benefitted from Nazi regime and I will never drive one for that reason, but I'm not going to try to assert that the Ford Pinto is a better car than the 911.

Yes, "better" means different things to different people.

But Porsche's history is just that, history. If a Porsche 911 would send all my data to Porsche it would not be a very good car in my eyes.

I don't think the UI of Matrix is meaningfully different than the one from Discord though. It's a bit like clothing IMO. Mainstream users are very brand-sensitive. They buy Nike shoes not because they're good quality but because it says Nike on them. I bet it works the same way with services.

>> If there was another option out there people would use it.

This statement seems to not account for lock-in or network effects. Why do people still use Oracle products or Microsoft products like Outlook or Excel? It's certainly a big stretch to say that these things are "the best" (although Excel is, objectively, the best) unless your definition of "the best" is simply "the thing we are currently using because if there were something better we'd be using that." This seems a bit circular to me.

Why do people use Discord (or Slack) for housing information instead of bringing it into a self-hosted forum or internal database? Because people were lazy when they started and they're too lazy to port it over now and the massive inefficiencies are distributed over time and a number of users. It's a tragedy of the commons.

>Because people were lazy when they started and they're too lazy to port it over now

Some of these communities are older than Discord but somehow they were lazy. It simply can't be because Discord/Slack are better tools. The implication that there are communities working on database internals using Discord, but they are too dumb to standup Discourse is astounding.

"When they started" has nothing to do with the company's founding but when they started using Discord for this particular purpose. Consider on-prem versus cloud and not switching between them when it makes financial sense because of lock-in and inertial resistance.

Another example: I used to use a wristwatch rather than my phone's clock (this is pre-smart watch) even though just using my phone would have been more efficient. Why did I do this? Because of habitual lock-in. How did I break out of it? I eventually realized how expensive it was to maintain my watch and that there was another option that I already had that did everything my watch did. In your world and under your definition of "the best" then my wristwatch was "the best" solution for telling time despite it obviously not being the most economical or efficient. Until it wasn't, and then my phone somehow became "the best" tool for telling time in your world.

> You don't use it because "you don't have a choice"

I do.

There are many dev communities like Svelte which use Discord so I'm forced to use it although I kinda hate it too.

All the marketing in the world isn't going to move the needle if your product doesn't solve a problem or offer a better experience for users.

To say that the success of discord was due to "pouring VC money into marketing" completely misses the whole "we also spent a lot of time and effort to build a product that was better than what was out there and solved a problem for our users."

It's not free hosting, but Discourse is quite popular for server admins that want a modern-looking design and it can be easily ran on a big box with docker-compose. If the admins have the cash, discourse does offer hosting[0], with companies like Cloudflare doing so[1].

0: https://www.discourse.org/pricing

1: https://community.cloudflare.com/

I'll take a Discourse forum over a Discord any day (though I haven't tried Discord's new forum feature). Discourse is an evolution of a forum, while (until now maybe) Discord is an evolution of IRC. Huge difference.

> it can be easily ran on a big box with docker-compose

And Discord "server" can be setup within several seconds via GUI.

Sadly, only for tiny minority really aware of vendor lock-in it will be preferable to setup Discourse.

Strong disagree. Usability and improved UX isn't sugar.

It took over like wildfire because it had 10x better UX than any combination of alternatives - and you definitely needed a combination to match the features. Start with the fact that it's not just chat, but also video, voice, and includes things like multimedia uploads that are a modern baseline, but still absent from many other services.

Forcing each question to be asked fresh also eliminates out-of-date replies. I often run into answers on forum archives that no longer work because the fast-moving software they are regarding has changed.

Suuuure, earth shattering.

Huh? Discord has really poor UX compared to other IM services I use, like Telegram. Notification settings are so complex that it takes trial, error, and missed important messages to end up with a sensible configuration (no broadcast mentions in any shape or form, no badges unless I'm mentioned by my own username or there's a reply to my message). Every little piece of its UI is custom-built and routinely defies my expectations about how UI controls should behave. Just a few examples of my pain points with Discord:

- They somehow managed to mess up the message text field so much that my system-wide text replacements don't work. They work literally everywhere else.

- When I want to add a reaction to a message, there's an emoji picker. It shows custom emoji FIRST, and it shows custom emoji from ALL "servers" I'm a member of. It takes actual time for something that should be a nearly-instant interaction.

- There are no last seen statuses when a user is offline.

- The files. Need I say more? Not only does that 8 MB limit feel like an insult in this day and age, so does Discord's insistence on always storing the original files as-is. OK for images, but I sometimes have to send screencasts, and you never know what size it even is. I end up having to upload them somewhere else and then send a link. Your files are too powerful, my ass.

And, yes, it's Electron, and at this point I'm convinced that an Electron app just can't possibly be good, no matter how hard you try and how good your engineers are.

Discords notifications are actually are nightmare. I still have a single (1) on my direct messages link and I cannot figure out (since like 2 month) where it comes from. And that all after I had a little red dot in the taskbar discord icon for like a year which I somehow managed to get rid of.

Overall its usability is okay for me, but there are really some big quirks.

> I still have a single (1) on my direct messages link and I cannot figure out

Maybe it's a friend request?

> And that all after I had a little red dot in the taskbar discord icon for like a year which I somehow managed to get rid of.

This is the most annoying thing. I think it means you have "some" unread messages. A single message in any of the 100s of channels in a dozen "servers" you're in will trigger that with default notification settings.

> Maybe it's a friend request?

Just tried that - nope. It actually was the "Nitro - 1 Month FREE" tab below "Friends".

Never tried that before...

It's because people get a really large amount of value out of real (or near-real) time discussion- in many cases more than they get out of archival reference. Forums slow down the interaction time drastically. I'm plenty old enough to remember using forums and subsequently switching to chat, and the ability to work through things and problem solve increased massively. Not being able to find things later is, well, a problem for later, so it gets deprioritized vs the problems of now.

This forum channels thing might be a middle ground that gives the possibility of free flowing interactions but with structure, and indexing as a possibility.

> Not being able to find things later is, well, a problem for later, so it gets deprioritized vs the problems of now.

Who said anything about finding things later? I want a forum because, for niche topics/questions, slow+indexed is the only way to hope anyone will be able to answer my question at all.

I can ask a question on a forum and maybe be answered a week later, by someone who's looking through older open threads under the expectation that they can still be of help; or I can ask a question in a chatroom and the people who know aren't online, chat continues, when they come online they've missed it, and so I get my response never.

It's a key difference in assumptions, mostly due to different etiquette.

When you solve a problem you asked about in a forum thread, you tend to say that. So a forum thread that remains open with no replies is effectively "left hanging", with the author still likely to be interested in an answer. So, for the people who offer help in such forums, there can be value in looking through old open forum threads / solving "cold cases."

Meanwhile, chat messages are sort of "drive-by" things, where you'll write a thing, and then, if nobody responds, leave and never come back. You were hoping for an immediate response; you didn't get it; so you gave up. There's no expectation of someone ever coming back, or seeing a response given much later; so people don't try to offer them.

...as well as the tiring dance of having to explain things over and over and...

In an ideal world, if i haven't found an answer from a previous thread on my own, i could be gently nudged into the right direction.

Mind you, i've been around on IRC for a very long time and know how tiring it can get to basically get asked the same question in different form all the time (and "having" to answer it).

Lots of forums I belong to have tons of already answered very common questions. I’ve joined a few on various topics from BBQing to NAS building. When I was building my NAS every single question I had was answered and they had plenty of stickies on various topics. IRC or discord would have been a fall back to the searchable knowledge of a forum.

The only time I had a question was when I ran into an issue with my UPS freezing up my NAS during power outages. The guy who figure it out could’ve helped faster on discord, still only took one work day of back and forth, but now the next guy can search my topic.

I think discord is a very good knowledge storage channel for newbies who are too novice to even form their questions coherently and need help to do so. Though it is taxing to help them and takes a lot of patience.

Is it possible to setup within two minutes forum that will be hosted for free and has decent interface with minimal ads (to the point that many will not recognize them as ads)?

Right now Discord has great usability and many people have Discord accounts.

Does GitHub discussions fill those requirements reasonably? https://docs.github.com/en/discussions

An example of this - https://github.com/nodejs/node/discussions

Discord has almost twice the active users and probably not a great deal of overlap with GitHub. And people won't necessarily want to join a community they would join on one with an account made on the other.

I get the impression that discord users are mostly children and not programmers.

While there might be some overlap as discord users grow up and decide to keep their discord account, I'm guessing that even in that case they will have a separate github/gitlab/whatever account for their professional or unprofessional programming.

There are a ton of very active programming related channels, mostly for open source projects. It's quickly replacing freenode as the place to go to chat about projects (love it or hate it). In fact, it's markdown support for code blocks is unmatched (imo and compared to Slack/Teams/etc) and is actually very nice to use as a place to discuss programming.

Github for some reason disables search engine indexing of wikis, not sure about discussions.

The problem that they have (and other user content created sites) if indexing was on is that SEO spammers use it to dump lots of links to sites.

That you don't see this is an indication that it works and dissuading those spammers.

Consider all the nearly forgotten repos out there that you occasionally stumble over and that there are no "work from home and get $30/hour - click here" or a dozen forms of "somespam.example.com" links peppering it.

Compare that with the old Wordpress blogs out there that haven't disabled comments and yet still have search indexing (or not, but spammers don't always dig far enough to see if there's a nofollow attribute on links).

So, for the most part, GitHub isn't indexed by search engines - and its across the board for the entirety of the site. Spammers realize that it is pointless to attempt in any of the forms that they could on other user created content sites and so expend no effort at all to post spam links.

Github discussions is searchable within GitHub in that repo. For example https://github.com/laravel/framework/discussions?discussions...

The wiki is fairly useful - and again, if you are searching for content in GitHub you can search wikis ( https://docs.github.com/en/search-github/searching-on-github... ) and get only content within GitHub (without having to sift through Google search results) with arguably a more powerful query language than Google's search bar ( https://docs.github.com/en/search-github/getting-started-wit... )

Personally, if I am looking for content for a FOSS that is hosted on GitHub I use GitHub's search for discussions and wikis first before trying to search for content in google.

But this doesn't explain why Issues are indexable on Google

What's the difference between a spammer creating their own repo and creating a bunch of issues with spam links vs their own repo and creating a bunch of wiki pages with spam links?

The difference is likely the ability for the community to flag and moderate a comment rather than an entire wiki and repository.

That said, the wiki workflow, permissions, and limitations in formatting may push people who are after a more durable store of information to create a GitHub pages site which is then managed with the same workflow (forks, pull requests, and reviews) as code, along with the ability for search engines to index the GitHub pages site.

Github discussions scale quite poorly if you have hundreds or thousands posts each day.

Also, for nonprogrammers Github is a really alien place.

And it is still proprietary lock-in.

But yes, it can be a viable alternative and at least is not asking phone number for read only access.

The discussions scale is a problem of you need people specifically triage and moderate the content. For large projects, I'll grand that this could scale poorly but for preserving information and discussions, it remains better than other options.

And yes, GitHub isn't the proper spot for non-programmers. All the workflows around it are geared to hosting a software or at least a site.

The proprietary lock-in... I don't agree with in that if that is an issue, then discord is too (and likely more). GitHub exposes the information for discussions quite easily - https://docs.github.com/en/graphql/guides/using-the-graphql-... I would be willing to take the stance that any forum that you don't host and access the underlying data without needing to go through the user facing application is lock in. With GitHub discussions, the access to the underlying data is more available than any other forum that you don't host yourself.

FWIW, from my work machine I access GitHub without issue. I can't access discord and will likely be unable to persuade such a change up the chain as Discord is largely seen as primarily chat for non-professional activities.

> The proprietary lock-in... I don't agree with in that if that is an issue

I was thinking here primarily about network effects.

> has decent interface with minimal ads

For now, while they still in "bait mode". If experience has something to show in the web is that once they go into switch mode, the more and more ads will come, interface will become worse as in a bad Facebook clone, site will become intentionally unusable on mobile to force people to install the app (with even more ads and tracking!), every minimally controversial subject for the advertisers will be banned, platform will start requiring phone numbers ("It's just to prevent spam and recovery your password, we swear!!"), an algorithmically controlled timeline will appear to improve engagement, text or longer posts will be de-prioritized to give more visibility to low-effort easy-consumption meme-like content (that give more of the said engagement), and "out of community" content will be pushed into it.

Reddit is currently best example of this happening.

Am I too pessimistic? Nope, I just saw this happen too many times.

If you want to build a future-proof online community, be prepared to deploy and control your own infrastructure and lose the "easy to get" users. Won't the cheap and won't be easy.

Oh definitely, especially given proprietary lock-in and effects of scale.

That is why I put "Right now Discord has great usability"

> platform will start requiring phone numbers

That is de facto happening already.

Discord has a low barrier to entry and continued use.

With a single account, I can join a dozen communities and easily stay up to date with them, and get an instant notification on my phone or desktop when someone answers a question I asked in any of them.

To do the same with a dozen phpbb communities, I need to create a dozen accounts and track each site individually.

> easily stay up to date with them

How do you stay up to date when there are thousands and thousands of messages generated per day or even per hour?

Aggressive muting of channels and servers.

You can control what triggers a notification on a per-server and even per-channel basis. For most big servers, I have everything set to mute except for when people @ me directly or respond to one of my messages.

And if you are kicked you can't access any of it, including your own content you wrote there.

Yep, and that's the story of how I lost years worth of discussions and chats because Discord thought well that linking a phone number doesn't automatically allow you to verify yourself with it.

> I wonder why information-heavy communities chose "knowledge storage" in the form of Discord.

They don't. Obviously chats are not knowledge storages but a means for quick communication.

I think chats like Gitter, Slack, and Discord proliferated because the realtime thing makes people feel differently vs async communication.

But, like Discord realized, chats are just terrible tools for communities built around learning and solving problems (like dev communities around a tech project). There's no collective learning anymore, no stored knowledge, etc. And the problem gets worse as a community grows.

As long as their search feature continues being so monumentally terrible to the point where you can't even reliably search for specific words(and straight up is unable to search for exact strings[0]) I doubt any kind of forum-like usage will be pleasant.

[0]: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600430...

Discord's search definitely has lots of space for improvement, but it's already among the best in all these new IM services.

For example, Telegram has it 10 times worse than Discord. It (roughly) can only search whole words, which basically means it doesn't work with East Asian languages at all (since they don't have spaces between words).

Probably worth pointing out that Whatsapp has near perfect search. I can go into any group chat and search for words and quickly skip to some reference from 5 years ago, then reply to that message

I've had the opposite experience. I've been thoroughly impressed with how I can search a word and find all instances of it going back months and months. It can do somewhat fuzzy searching too which is huge.

Discord search? terrible? I've been ludicrously impressed with it over the years. one of my favorite discord features

I regret ever supporting Discord with Nitro subscription. At the time it seemed user-funded model would make them less dependent on external money. That simply didn't turn out to be the the case. They are obviously yet another wannabe big tech company based in California.

Their privacy policy (and practices) is awful. They routinely suspend inconvenient servers without giving it a second thought. They've used gaming as a ticket to fame, but then scrubbed every mention of games from their UX after receiving $100M from a VC company.

I've stopped using Discord for most purposes. For group chats I use Wire, which admittedly has much shittier UI, but it's free for small groups and E2E encrypts all conversations.

What I hate more is more ppl are using discord as default support. IT moves to quick, and repeat questions and answers needs bot. It's easier for people to piss in the well because chat is so fleeting, can easily take conversations out of context with screenshots.

I really miss the old school PHPBB forums which were "slower" and that was good for support from the vendor's point of view. Very few cases require real time staff chatting and available all the time. It seems to invite more trouble than its worth.

I don't think many people miss the dauys of PHBB in practice. Having to sign up for the hundred forum account, often needing admin approval before posting, etc.

actually many communities still using phpbb like nsxprime, ferrarichat

i found that discussions were more civil, trolls were quickly purged and it was difficult for them to rejoin due to this admin wall.

it created a nice garden effect against shill/ratioing where there is little to no barrier to creating mass number of accounts to impact opinions.

> actually many communities still using phpbb like

But the point of your complaint is that many communities have moved away from phpbb or similar type forums.

> Having to sign up for the hundred forum account

On the other hand for just browsing around I don't need to sign up at all, and I can stumble across interesting things through either a web search or perchance a link from elsewhere. With Discord neither is possible, because it's all inaccessibly hidden behind a login wall.

Personally there are only a few forums I'm really actively participating in, but there are quite a few more I'm just happy to occasionally browse through, and quite a few more I just randomly stumble across while searching for information on whatever subject currently occupies me.

While having to sign up separately for every forum might be considered somewhat more of a hassle, personally I don't find it that annoying and in any case it's only every now and than that I actually feel the urge to actively contribute something.

The way Discourse (or Facebook groups for that matter) works on the other hand means that all the serendipity stuff of randomly stumbling across some interesting forum thread on a subject I'm interested in or a problem I'm having can't even happen in the first place because like I said it's all inaccessibly hidden behind a login wall.

So I'll gladly trade the "inconvenience" of separately run forums and even slightly annoying sign up procedures for being able to just casually browse through and being able to find them at all in the first place.

>They've used gaming as a ticket to fame, but then scrubbed every mention of games from their UX after receiving $100M from a VC company.

what's wrong with that?

did anything change in the way Discord works cuz of that? because I didn't notice

> but then scrubbed every mention of games

There is a gaming area with a list of all the popular gaming discords, and it still shows your gaming status if you are playing a game. Was there anything more to it than that?

They operated a games storefront and library for a short period of time, but that died pretty quickly.

Branding. Discord had references to games, gamers and gaming both in their client UI and official website. Placeholder images, Easter eggs and so on. All of that was scrubbed or replaced. Above all, it was a change in whom they consider their real target audience.

Won't someone think of the gamers!

I'd love to get feedback on my project sqwok.im and whether it may interest you.

> Their privacy policy (and practices) is awful.

Like?

I am curious about this as well. We take privacy very seriously at Discord. Earlier this year, we entirely re-wrote our privacy policy as well to be more plain English and less legalese. I think that it's actually one of the more well written privacy policies out there.

>We take privacy very seriously at Discord.

You don't even have something as basic as adjustable message retention. You host your service on Google Cloud and AFAIK, you don't use E2E for anything, not even direct messages.

Your privacy policy includes the following clause:

  We may share information if needed to enforce our Terms of Service, Community Guidelines, or other policies, or to protect the rights, property, and safety of ourselves and others.

Which, as anyone semi-aware will realize, is generic enough to allow for sharing anything with anyone.

Oh, and according to the same privacy policy you retain deleted account information for at least two years by default. Anything else requires the user to "submit an ID for an age verification appeal". That's telling in its own right.

https://reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/rsxeee/you_should_neve...

> There is no way the freemium nitro barriers keep discord from going under, Discord's entire hope is that eventually it will be bought out by a tech giant

And yet they have not been purchased yet.

> Discord collects everything you do inside

Make a post on HN saying "disable newrelic if you value user privacy" and see how well that goes.

> Things tracked outside the program include : programs you run and other system specific information that can identify your hardware (such as your HWID's)

Discord does not collect the programs you run on their server. It does scan for them to enable the game tracking feature. See the post by u/GlenMerlin:

> Logging your opened apps is an optional setting (mostly done to detect discord rich presence for games, so your friends can see you're playing halo infinite and join with one click) and you can turn it off and the data is stored locally.

> All it takes is 1 breach to make every message you ever sent public information.

I can assure you extracting any sizable fraction of Discord's messages will incur at least a few hundred petabytes of data transfer fees within a day, triggering DLP alerts or maybe even regular billing "unnatural increase in data transfer costs" alerts. Even if Discord were hacked, their infrastructure makes actually downloading user data both infeasible and riskier than just dumping the user DB containing emails and hashed passwords. To add, that's just for data stored on the server - the actual "science" api containing things like how you use Discord likely accumulates hundreds of petabytes worth of data a month on its own, it'd be easier to download the generated user behavior reports than to download the data itself.

The E2E criticism is valid but users obviously don't care enough to move off of Discord, even with the privacy campaigns against them and efforts to move communities over to Guilded.

I was talking with some friends about how the gaming community of today has no idea what Teamspeak, Ventrilo or Mumble are. What does Discord do that these others never did well?

Screen share, video conference, filesharing (TS had a primitive fileserver), and rich text/emoji, persistent chat, and a better UI for moving from server to server.

The mumble client already supports using certs for identity. I think if Mumble could make multi-server browsing easier and have screenshare/videoshare, that would be enough for many people to swing back to a decentralized tool.

After screenshare and server browsing, having "Mumble as a Service" to spin up a new server instantly ala Discord would be the killer migration feature to compete.

I wonder if any Mumble developers think about pivoting to a more direct competition with Discord? Or if any people with videoconference software dev experience would know where to start on Mumble?

Honestly, matrix.org is the best alternative.

Its basically the new chat standard.

My OSS Project (Lit - at https://lit.dev) just moved our community chat from Slack to Discord[1] and we couldn't be happier right now. one of the main reasons is the velocity that Discord is moving to add useful community oriented features like this.

Assuming this means that Forum Channels are GA now, we're going to us them for our #ask-for-help channel to make them more organized and searchable. I think it's a great middle ground between Reddit / old-school forums and chats which are dominating the community space right now. Having both in one place (along with voice and video channels, and events) is awesome!

btw, Discord's bot API is wonderful as well. We easily made a `/docs` bot that searches our Algolia site docs search index, shows results in Discord and lets the user choose a result to link to. It's great for answering questions.

[1]: https://lit.dev/discord

Just a curious question: Why Discord instead of something like Zulip?

I myself use both for different projects, but for OSS I tend to gravitate towards Zulip, and for closed-source ones Discord.

In large part because it seems like just about every other OSS project is on Discord these days, and Discord makes it very easy to see all your servers at once and switch between them seamlessly. We're already seeing more activity even with only some users having migrated so far (it's only been a week for us).

I looked into options a while back, and had also considered Matrix which seemed to fit with open-source a lot better, but it had a relative lack of features and momentum compared to Discord. Zulip seems more like Slack, and since we liked Discord's approach and feature set too, Zulip wasn't that appealing.

The velocity????? Discord’s product has barely changed, they move so slow, but thanks to their market dominance no one has been able to compete

This has not been my experience. Compared to slack they are moving much faster

What? discord is iterating so rapidly API lib/bot devs can barely keep up

They just replaced the Android app with a react native monstrosity so slow I can read a page while it loads a conversation.

I think they've been iterating fairly quickly tbh. Loads of improvements for bots (slash commands, modals, buttons, message context menu api, etc), threads, these 'forum channels'.

Whatever you can say about Discord's iteration speed, Slack is 100x slower.

You could be a lot happier, really - in both practical and ethical segments. By using a sane alternative instead of a privacy-hostile proprietary platform.

I am personally very excited for this. While yes, we have gone full circle (as I'm sure many will point out), I do think this was missing from Discord for various use-cases. I'm excited to see servers I'm in evolve with this new feature.

Since we've come full circle, I'm now wondering what new chat thing will replace Discord later this decade.

Discord voice has finally become available on Xbox and Playstation support is coming soon.

I think this is going to make it pretty difficult for potential Discord challengers to usurp it. Unless the competitor comes from a company with enough clout or money to convince Microsoft and Sony to support it.

So Discord displaces forums..and then brings them back in a worse way (walled garden, in a web app, probably no search engine indexing because they aren't actually web pages)

Maybe the next evolution is something that's both good at being a forum and good at being interactive chat.

I think what people always miss in the "come full circle" bit is that it's usually "come full circle, but having integrated what we learned along the way." Discord took over due to the ability to have real or near-real time communication, and the vastly improved UX around a whole host of things. Discord was never intended/ to replace forums, that just happened because people started using in that way.

Now they are recreating the forum experience with the addition of all of the learnings from having built discord. Should be good!

> we have gone full circle

And ended with better interface and proprietary lock-in

Have we come full circle? Sounds like we have. Maybe next up is news groups.

Full circle to closed Cloud SaaS offerings where everyone is at the mercy of a corporation.

Reddit has built the corporate version of Newsgroups already.

Earlier discussion about Discord being a black hole for information https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30311982

Is Discord's UI/UX just hideously awful or is this just me? Here are a few highlights:

- Icons for the servers you're on. I know what it's called. I don't know the name. Maybe there's a way to search for that? If so, it doesn't appear to be obvious;

- Multiple places where you set settings;

- You can create an alias for a given server but you have to do this manually. If you forget (or possibly people can see it anywhere) your identity is linked or can be leaked. Why is there no cohesive model for pseudonymity?

- Searching and indexing. Nuff said;

- Discord gives you a collection of essentially walled gardens. Personally I find this to be a subpar experience;

- You can follow certain channels in another server. Or sometimes you can't. No idea why. Did the owner block it? I have no idea. Sometimes you just don't have the option and there's nothing to tell you why. Overall this is just a bad experience also;

- Discord seems to be built for people who are terminally online on that server. People who see every chat message. If you're not in that category all you see is a hot mess with no direction;

- Direct messages are another hot mess. Finding particular DMs or people can be a challenge. It's also used for spam and scams where servers haven't locked down the ability to DM other people on that server;

- Discovery of servers is awful. You're relying on other sources for this in its entirety.

So now we're having another communication model: forums. Great. Forums don't work for finding information. There's a reason why the likes of Reddit or even Stack Overflow supplanted forums: you can bubble up good comments or answers and skip all the noise that inevitably pollutes forums (eg "first!", "you shouldn't do X").

At least Discord has some authentication mechanisms to tie in with other platforms and the ability to make bots (note: I've never actually made one so I have no idea how easy or hard this is).

Still, it's another embedded Chrome Electron bloatware nightmare.

I've never understood the appeal. What am I missing? Because I'm sure I'm missing something.

Its not you. It’s a disaster. I often wonder how something like this even came to be.

For me the biggest issue is the most basic: the UI is a mix of random icons (some labeled and some not), text buttons and command line functions. But there is no rhyme or reason. It’s even difficult to explain how to do something.

I imagine if you have a disability where you can’t use standard inputs or use a screen reader that Discord is, in fact, completely unusable.

>I've never understood the appeal. What am I missing? Because I'm sure I'm missing something.

- Easy to use multiplatform free voice chat. That was the original biggest selling point. Yes not everyone wants to selfhost or pay for something a dedicated server, basically killed Teamspeak, Mumble etc and such

- UX which is still better than any combination of alternatives. Yes people want rich media chat, voice, private messages etc.

- It just works. As I said above there might be individual better options but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts

It's not perfect at all but does its job and what I want.

> - You can create an alias for a given server but you have to do this manually. If you forget (or possibly people can see it anywhere) your identity is linked or can be leaked. Why is there no cohesive model for pseudonymity?

I'm not sure I understand; pseudonymity is the norm on Discord. If you're worried about your identity being leaked, then why not make the pseudonym your username and use your real name as an alias on the few servers where you want it to be known?

Also, I feel like the Quick Switcher (Ctrl/Cmd + K) would alleviate a lot of your problems finding things.

> - You can follow certain channels in another server. Or sometimes you can't. No idea why. Did the owner block it? I have no idea. Sometimes you just don't have the option and there's nothing to tell you why. Overall this is just a bad experience also

Server owners have the option to create announcement channels (different from text channels), you can subscribe to those and the owners of the channel can choose to publish posts. You can tell which channels you can subscribe to by the megaphone instead of the hashtag on the left of the channel name.

> - Icons for the servers you're on. I know what it's called. I don't know the name. Maybe there's a way to search for that? If so, it doesn't appear to be obvious;

What does this mean? if you are looking for a server that you are in by name you can do ctrl-k to open the command palette and search with that

I knew Discord would eventually try to become a forum. Every new communications paradigm tries to become all things to all people. Sadly, Discord will never be as good a forum as vbulletin/xenforo or even phpbb, and it'll lose some of it's focus elsewhere attempting to do so.

And then when Discord eventually folds all of this info will be lost, as it's not even easily archivable.

Meh, Internet Archive doesn’t meaningfully archive any dead forum either. It gets one page of one thread here and two pages of this other thread there.

It’s basically unusable except to stimulate some nostalgia. So I don’t think Discord changes much in this regard.

I wish Discord had a better way to organize servers you're in. I'm in somewhere around a hundred, and have no proper way to categorize/sort/tree them. The best you have is top-level groups (which make the icons unreadably tiny) and that just isn't sufficient.

Discord's UI acts like everyone is in all of 5 or so servers and that's it.

Oh so much this. I find discord utterly impossible to use and keep up with. I'm in 8 servers, each one has a bunch of channels. I have no clue what's going on. Every time I log in I have to click through 8 servers and like 150 different channels.

I've just given up and I'll just never use it again. Absolute dumpster fire.

I get discord is the hot thing but I find it to be so noisy. Maybe its because i'm old but I don't know how people are able to find relevant things. Its like slack on speed.

This seems closer to the Zulip model of chat, which I have always been a huge fan of (but forced to use Slack instead). I see open source projects using Discord. I ask a question and then it doesn't get answered and is lost in the chat. When a project uses forums via Discourse, information is much better organized.

What I don't get is why so many open source projects choose to use a closed source walled garden as their primary means of communication, it seems entirely counterethical to OSS.

It has really well designed UI and UX and for now is not intensively monetizing.

(not saying that it is a good thing but Discourse, Telegram are awful, forums are horrible to maintain and so on)

Why can't you discover Discord servers with less than 1 thousand users?

IRC had this same discoverability problem, Discord can solve it.

How do you grow a Discord server without having a community somewhere else?

I wonder if Discord will ever catch on in the corporate world.

I use Slack for work and Discord for recreation. Is it just me, or does Discord just seem vastly superior to Slack? Slack is so tedious to navigate by comparison, especially when you have many channels with separate PMs in them. Discord just continues to get better in the right ways, but Slack just feels bloated with features that it takes too much effort to find what you need.

I'm the same way. Slack for my day job and multiple Discord servers for my friend groups. I greatly prefer Discord over Slack (replies being one of the things I like most, stop trying to make ~~fetch~~ threads happen Slack).

The only thing I wish Discord supported better are group chats (not on a server). They support them but there is no way to "pin" them to the main sidebar. In general I wish I had more control over the Discord sidebar (show specific channels and/or group chats).

The value of Slack is its integrations with dozens of business apps like Jira. They don't focus much on end user UX because that's not the point of it - they deliver straight business value. It wasn't until recently Discord bots were capable of much other than parsing chat messages and reactions for input, let alone the full menus google calendar puts into Slack. I'd love a Discord frontend to slack (see https://cancel.fm/ripcord for a serious attempt at one) but Slack itself is not going away anytime soon.

It's inevitable. Discord is still not profitable, and when it comes time to pay the bills with real money, they'll probably scramble to re-brand themselves with a boring name (maybe Coherence - the opposite of Discord) and try to capture some corporate clients. I can just hear the salespeople now: "We're just like Slack, only better!" (No mention of gamers anywhere).

When slack had threads and discord didn't it was vastly superior, because without threads everything is a jumbled mess. I still find slack's threads implementation to be better.

Great, Discord has reinvented forums in a walled garden with a gamified payment model.

There's no paywall at all. What are you talking about?

Try sending a big message or file over 8Mb.

What forums let you do that? Every forum I use (all based on Xenforo, admittedly) don't allow file uploads period, except for a small avatar. All other content must be embedded through external links. Which Discord also supports.

Not sure where the paywalling of forum features is happening there.

Guilded had this a long time ago: https://support.guilded.gg/hc/en-us/articles/360040216933-Fo...

No one used them for the same reason Discord killed forums: realtime chat is better for most things people used forums for.

huh, is guilded basically just an exact replica of discord?

Early forum software copied features back and forth and often looked very similar. Modern PHPBB doesn't look much different from the original perl UBB, for example. Keeping the tradition alive.

i'm pretty impressed by how close it is, at least from the screenshots. if you swapped out the logos for discord logos, there's no way I'd notice or even be able to tell you what's different if you told me

Discord has unsuable registration feature. Lol, tried many times to register with username vs email and everything is a mess.

Oh, more ways to hoard user data and metadata and sell it.

Following the guide at https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-... it seems I cannot add a "Forum Channel" to my own Discord channel. I only see the types "Text" and "Voice" when trying to add a new channel. Is this something that is rolling out over the next couple of days or should be possible?

Seems strange to announce something before it completely rolled out to everyone, so thinking something is wrong with my setup.

I think this is a feature for community servers, so make sure you've converted yours to a community.

Begs the question, why is this locked behind community mode? Most of what they add seems to be these days, and while in some cases it makes sense, in this case it does not.

My guess is that a lot of small, tightly-knit (i.e. everybody knows everybody already) servers don't need or want all of the extra "community" stuff. Community features seem like they're mostly for managing loosely-knit communities that are big enough to need different trust levels, onboarding procedures, announcements etc.

In fact, the Discord UI says as much: "Don't [convert your server to Community] if your server is just for you and a few friends. Community servers are for admins who are building larger spaces where people with shared interests can come together."

I'm not sure any of that answers my question. If I don't want a public or large community I'm not supposed to convert to community, okay, but I can still want thread channels for organizing information. They aren't useless for small groups of people, and the same is true for some of the other community-locked features.

And enabling community mode isn't necessarily the solution either. It comes with a bunch of dubious nonsense attached:

> Scan media content from all members: this will scan all media sent in the server and delete any content that contains explicit content

I don't trust an automated algorithm to make moderation decisions for me.

> Rules or Guidelines Channel

Useless in a private community.

> Discord may check the contents of your server to make sure it’s safe!

I don't need a paternalistic american tech company invisibly making judgement calls on what my private community does or doesn't do.

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047132851

I think we just have a difference of opinion (or a different use case) when it comes to threaded channels. Personally, I don't have any use for them in any of the small Discord groups that I'm in, so I'm perfectly happy with having them classed alongside "Rules channels" and the like. Based on their decision here I suspect that Discord sees it the same way. Obviously, you feel differently.

mostly because Forums look to be 95% just messages in a channel with a thread for the conversation, just with a forum UI frontpage. on your small servers just make a channel, topic messages are sent to it, and then people talk in a thread.

Same here, I imagine they'll roll it out to all servers over the next few days/weeks.

Edit: from the blog post, it's working it's way out and is for Community servers:

> Forum channels are slowly making their way to Community servers starting today — keep an eye out on your own server to see when you’ll be able to create Forum channels! Don’t have Community enabled? Check out what features enabling Community brings to you and your server here.

Aah, I see. That wasn't at all clear from the "Forum Channels FAQ" linked above. Hopefully someone from Discord sees this + previous posts and includes the requirements for getting forum channels :)

I wish they broke down and let people have the /ignore feature that they've been crying out for, instead of just having to rely on the very clumsy and comparatively loud blocking feature.

I wonder that Discord doesn't use Discord for their own support forums:

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us

An example:

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/532642...

This looks a lot like Zendesk.

Maybe they finally realize that long-term knowledge retention is a good thing.

Is there ever going to be a way to do this that doesn't require all of my members to get verified email addresses and send every single message through automated content filters?

Google Wave finally found a new home.

All that, and still no photo gallery option... They added flicking through photo dumps, but thumbnailing them and putting them in a nice gallery is apparently still too hard.

This is actively being worked on right now actually :)

Oh for real? Thanks!

"Hi, Discord, it looks like you are trying to take over the internet. Would you like another few hundred million so we can further centralize everything?"

I think it’s pretty common for open source projects and even companies to use a combination of Discord and Discourse. Discord entering the forum space makes a lot of sense.

If they can figure out how to make the forums public / exposed to search engines then it could entirely remove the need for Discourse.

Seems like a huge improvement over threads, which get lost all the time.

Didn't they add forum channels several months ago? Is this different? Or was it limited to certain servers and now they're rolling it out to everyone?

it was a beta feature before.

They're not even rolling it out to everyone apparently, since you have to be a "community" server.

In terms of building a community to share and discuss information, would Reddit serve the same purpose as this, and if so would it be better or worse?

Yoo they disrupted the old forums, and then add their own? No more phpBB or vBulletin, next they'll add BBS and news groups, can't wait.

Is Discord the "federated social media" that everyone has been looking for?

How are they going to monetize?

It's not federated though...?

No, it's as centralized as they ever come. The "servers" are a misnomer, really. That's what they call communities/workspaces for some reason. If you want federated social media, you're looking for Mastodon and other ActivityPub projects. I'm also building my own one.

Discord has a premium subscription tier and in 2021 did >$200M via that monetization strategy.

https://discord.com/nitro

Honestly I would rather just use Matrix.

What they need now is just better clients, element needs to improve.

We’re doing our best… https://element.io/blog/an-unrecognisable-improvement-elemen...

When is Discord going to add advertisements?

Maybe Discord could replace Confluence now?

so its just threads but a different view?

A move against Reddit?

How about FTP?

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