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Comment by LexiMax | Hacker News Reader

> Discord does have some user capture, but nothing like twitter's

More importantly, Discord's communities are silo'ed, private by default, and administered and moderated by human beings with almost no oversight from Discord proper.

There is no equivalent on Twitter. On Reddit, going dark makes you subject to administrative subreddit takeover. But if someone runs a Discord community that they want to migrate to another platform, they could easily lock the entire server to posting and post a link to the alternative community. Done.

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It isn't siloed though, not truly - not in the way Teamspeak or Mumble used to be, at least. Discord's global friends list is what will keep people from abandoning it in droves, unfortunately, and until Teamspeak et al sort that out it isn't changing.

EDIT: Maybe I completely forgot how Teamspeak works. It seems like there is a global friends list, but I can't remember that it was a thing back in the day (10+ years ago).

The friends list is inconsequential. It's for sending private messages to people you already know and met from a Discord server. Long running group chats are an aberration, people just start up micro-discords instead.

And that is what Discord alternatives will have to solve - the ease of setting up a new Discord "server" by any old random user is hard to beat in terms of convenience. Matrix is the only real alternative on that front.

However, if you have an established community and have at least a little hosting knowledge among the staff, the moat is shallow to nonexistent, and it's just a matter of how much of a pain in the neck Discord decides to be.

The discord servers my friends and I use are just for shit posting and using voice among like 10 of us. If it becomes annoying we can move to the next thing. We're all millennials. We can run whatever server if needed it's not a big deal.

If you meet somebody mid match in a game like Valorant or Overwatch, it's simple to give them a username and they can add you and you then choose to group voice call vs inviting them to a private server, especially before you know them very well.

Teamspeak, as far as I know, doesn't have a way to solve this.

I'll admit that this use case didn't really occur to me, because the signal to noise ratio is so damn bad in matchmade games these days. If I want to play a game on voice call with strangers, I go to the community space first and then organize a team there.

That being said, after thinking about it, I actually have done what you're talking about before - just not on Discord. When I find someone, I simply add them on Steam, PSN, or whichever account the game uses.

There's also really nothing to a community beyond its mods, its users, and maybe some bots. Reddit creates a record of EVERYTHING and in many ways those years of discussion are the sub more than the current users or mods alone. Discord is nothing like that, if you could get everyone on the same page a Discord clone would work just as well, and relatively seamlessly.

tl;dr Discord has a moat, but it's not very wide or deep.

That's not true. Plenty of Discord communities have dozens of channels with long-running post histories, pictures, FAQ content, beginner guides; server roles and titles, permissions, custom emoji, stickers, etc.

Migrating all of that stuff to a new service (which may not even support it all) would be a huge pain.

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