this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2024
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I'm completely out of the loop, so I might as well ask you: where is discord so established? Never used it in my life. I used IRC, ICQ and MSN in their time. Now for work Slack, teams and zoom. Signal and Telegram privately. Email for everything.
What am I missing? What does discord provide?
Discord is used a lot for gaming groups, modding, software development, and has largely replaced forums for lots of niche communities
Which is unfortunate. Hiding projects, code and support behind discord is just wrong.
There are Linux and open source communities on discord. I mean, just think about that for a second. These people have chosen to put their stuff on a platform that has refused to acknowledge the existence of their OS / development platform. Every other post on Reddit in the Linux community before I left was about some half assed discord workaround.
Personally I originally went to Discord because it was the alternative to skype which was increasingly becoming shittier and shittier when Microsoft bought it.
Discord is great as chat program. It should've only ever been used for that. It completely sucks as forum replacement. Discord should've had very little value to any decent organization.
I have a hobby development project with a modest community and maintain a Discord server basically because it's necessary in order to avoid reducing my potential community reach by at least 50%.
I'm active on GitHub and respond to comments and issues there. I maintain an official thread for my project on the official forum for the game it's related to. I also keep all documentation, downloads, and guides off Discord and on the clearnet. Discord is still easily 80% or more of where people look for information about the project.
Yeah, I'm just sort of also complaining because it feels like I have to use it.
Every single small game I play has effectively the entirety of their support, community and forums run through discord. Instead of easy to search and discover forums, I have to use crappy infinite chat logs. It sucks.
A really ugly and confusing UI.
You sure about that part? I thought they shut down. I guess they might have some user-based servers?
if you read the whole sentence it might make more sense...
Whoops, I certainly missed that. Thank you!
Discord is fashionable. That’s it. The whole app is fantastically impractical if you want to use file or screen sharing. It’s just a bunch of gamers circle-jerking each other, which is a perfect way to keep them from infesting the rest of the internet.
I say this with all due respect: Who gives a shit? If you were foolish enough to dump your entire community into Discord alone and don't have an off-ramp, that's your own fucking problem.
EDIT: Also, Matrix already has a bridge for Discord and has for a while:
https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/discord/
Say you have no idea how any of this works without saying you have no idea how any of this works.
Why is it our job to fix the problems of a private, profit-focused company?
Honestly the onboarding for a lot of alternatives to various to popular platforms/apps (Matrix, Mastodon, etc) seems to be the biggest impediment to more adoption of those platforms and apps.
By onboarding here I mean the communities that use those platforms recruiting others to join them and help build communities up.
Like goddamn if that users comment was the first time I'd heard of Matrix it would have turned me away for sure.
Not to mention Mastodon having a reputation that proceeds it.