Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajuc | Hacker News Reader

This is why open source for communication platforms is so important.

Discord WILL disappear at some point and millions of people will lose their communities.

Online communities are far more transient and far less effective than ones rooted in geography. I'm not saying that they don't provide value or aren't worthwhile.

Online communities can rebuild quickly are more resilient in a sense e.g. Digg to Reddit migration.

Discord's just a platform. When Discord will disappear, I don't think it would happen overnight and the communities would have time to decide where to relocate, hopefully for an open-source self-hosted solutions, but more likely for the next hot thing in instant communication. And it's not as if communities don't move from platform to platform already: like wasn't there a big wave of people moving from Digg to Reddit a while back?

for discord emigres, teamspeak still exists, and for social media all you need is an old school forum that hosts videos and voila

The author of the article claims that a mere migration to a new platform does not solve the problem. It just fragments the community. I agree with that. For one or another reason not all people will migrate.

stay on discord then i suppose? if you dont like discord, staying on it is surely not an option though i assumed?

I am not on discord, so I don't have skin in the game. But it depends on the community I guess. If everyone stayed on discord then there would be no change. But any kind of change would probably have some kind of effect, even if all people migrated to a new platform.

I can try to think of a simple scenario. For whatever reason, a user may not be as active in the new platform as they were on discord. This could alter the community dynamics. On a bigger scale this could have visible effects in the actual community.

To be clear, I am not advocating in favor of staying on discord. I just find the concept of community building interesting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com