this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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Asklemmy
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Ever since Reddit killed itself, the only places I really lurk are Kbin (and therefore Lemmy by proxy) and Discord. That's pretty much it.
I have ignored Discord for years until recently. It just seems like IRC with a lot of flashiness and emojis. Is there more to this experience? I don't intend to be disparaging, but I looked for some specific topic servers and just found the quality of discussion to be low and the experience to be chaotic.
I'm willing to be told I'm doing it wrong though - is there a "here's the right way to get into discord" approach I'm missing?
Discord shines when you use it with a tight-knit group. A RL friend group, a gaming clan, etc.
But there are a ton of these big public servers that are essentially just spam, because that's what happens when you collect a load of random people in one place who have one minor interest in common at best, and then try and get them to hang out socially.
It's a group chat app, not a forum. And being thrown into a group chat with 100 strangers is kind of the worst.
I have barely ever used Discord. What does it offer that you couldn't find in, say, a Signal Group?
Discord is built for gaming. Discord allows you to stream a game directly to a channel with one click. Discord allows for fine control over users in the server and what they are allowed to do. Signal doesn’t really have these features, and I’m guessing it’s becsuse the purpose is slightly different.
The closest privacy focused alternative to discord that I know of is Matrix. I’m thinking of moving my discord server where my friends and I play together over to Matrix. We will lose some features but gain some privacy.
I think there are discord clones that work very much like discord, but I’m not aware of their privacy focus. Revolt comes to mind : https://revolt.chat
Thank you for the detailed answer!
I've never used Signal, so can't really answer that. But really assuming it's the same sort of thing, which group messaging app you're using isn't as important as the people you're using it with.
Personally I don't do group chats on a lot of other apps due to them being quite all-or-nothing in terms of notifications. My favourite thing about Discord (been using it since back when it was in alpha) was the ability to separate out different channels and have actual granular control over what's worth being notified about.
I don't use voice / video chat much at all but it's so handy to, for example, have it for the annual fantasy football draft in my league server even though we literally don't touch it and just stick to 100% text chat the rest of the year.
If signal does all those things too, then they're probably pretty similar.
OK, thanks!