I never understood this obsession of open source projects with Discord. Why is Discord treated as if it was somehow different from all the other commercial offerings?
Or an email address.
Or a contact form.
But no, only the aptly named Discord.
Discord is fine for gaming, sharing memes, and chatting with friends. We really need to stop using it for everything else.
Subreddits are not suitable as forums - you just have two sticky posts, and the Reddit format punishes long discussions in a single thread.
If you need to search older posts or want to keep context of some specific subject in a thread, a phpBB-style forum is better.
With Discord if you want premium stuff you pay for it at an individual level, and having the free tier doesn’t limit important functionality like message history.
With Slack your workspace’s cost is based on how many people are members in the workspace. You can’t have one member decide to buy a premium subscription and another one decide not to. You’re either all in on paying money for every user or you’re stuck on a gimped free version that hides message history and has other limitations.
As someone who experienced online chat rooms, forums and IRC....it is crazy to me that something like Slack is even successful.
And there's a bunch of neat features that are somewhat unique, like using roles to sign up for specific types of announcements. It can be a chat room, or a forum, or voice/video chat, or a substitute for email notifications, or all of the above. I think that versatility is important too.
I'm not a gamer so I only used Discord for those open source projects, maybe it'd be different otherwise. It always seemed that most of Discord's efforts went into new features rather than keeping things stable. The constant churn and restructuring of the UI is a huge pain in the butt, and with a larger server we spent way too much time moving around channels and managing automations and rules.
In fact, the stability of their UI is something that I've greatly appreciated. What about the UI is changing?
As far as UI hierarchy goes, its mostly been a challenge of the use cases for open source not fitting well with Discord. Too many channels, permission levels, and an unmanageable sidebar structure. That may just be an issue with scale of a larger OSS project, that's my only experience with it.
its a joke compared to irc
Discord aimed to replace TeamSpeak and Skype but it is such a stable platform with so much customization it can be used for almost anything.
People even use it as a customer support system or as a command and control center.
My university uses Discord, my skydiving club uses Discord, many FOSS communities use Discord.
Discord has also open sourced quite a few of their tools.
And Discord has always supported the creation of bots via their stable REST api.
Do you disagree with the ‘real’ statement that GP was trying to say, that whatever “functionality on offer” that Discord provides is a poor substitute for forums?
- The chat literally isn’t ephemeral. It is saved forever and you can search it.
- Bots and webhooks. Communities can have very advanced functionality there. Applications can interact with the Discord API and do a huge variety of things. For example, I have a bot installed that sends alerts for free game sales on PC game platforms.
- Multiple Voice/video/streaming channels in the same server. You can manage huge real time social events.
- Cross-server socialization. You can make friends in one community and interact with the same people in other communities with no friction.
- No registration friction. You can join other servers (forums) without making another account.
I’d make the argument that you’re backwards on this. Forums are a poor substitute for Discord or any similar product. If you started with Discord and decided to migrate your community to a forum solution you’d be looking at lost functionality.
People seem to cite lack of Google-searchability as the main downside with Discord but the people who use it don’t actually need that. In fact you could easily get around it: for example, you could make a Discord channel for support that automatically creates GitHub issues out of Discord messages.
I suspect the biggest reason is moderation: a private discord can just kick you out, while a public forum has to moderate the whole internet's interaction with it.
Really not that hard to understand.
IRC sucks, federated systems suck (not that they have to, they just do right now)
Be the change you want to see in the world and make something that works better than Discord and fits with your philosophy.
Why better? Because no one else cares about your philosophy they will only go through the motions to jump ship if it’s a better fit for their routine