Ask Lemmy

“A mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n.”

-John Milton, Paradise Lost

Its fantastic for what it is, its meh at what a lot of people try to make it, its garbage for a lot of stuff.

As a group chat, a place to hang out, or for a community that is looking for breakout rooms, its fantastic. I have a discord that's just friends of mine, we have like 20-25 people, it gets 4 or 5 messages a day, unless we are actively having some discussion, sometimes people jump online and make an impromptu video hangout. Its fantastic.

Similarly, its fantastic for the magic groups I am in. Sure the meme page gets flooded, but thats what its for, you can post an lfg to the lfg channel, and find a game fairly quickly, then you jump over into a dedicated room and have fun.

Im in a couple of groups that organize for large events (think burning man groups), and its great for that. Discussions tend to be focused, we make breakout rooms for specific things (like camp layout, shift rotation etc). There are a couple rooms that are just for general chatter, but we only have like 20-30 people, so convos dont move that fast, its rare to have more than 3 in a week in the general hangout rooms, and rarely more than 2 at once.

Its meh as a community hangout, I am part of several board game store or magic store discords, and all of them are kinda...meh. You can occasionally set up for big games on them, and they tell you when tournaments or events are, but with too many people it becomes unfocused, individual stuff gets lost in the noise.

Its terrible as a forum, or as a general social media, searching for history sucks, nothing has permanence unless it is saved off of discord (its great for having a meeting about camp layout, but somebody needs to actually save the camp layout documents or they get lost).

Looking to switch, tried running a Matrix server with Element but a pain in the ass to set up and admin and I never got voice to work. I also don't have the social pull to move people. May try Nextcloud as it it looks easier to work with, and has voice and a bunch of other crap. Probably get a friend or 2 and leave a bot run a bridge channel for the people still on discord.

Struggling to make friends to actually communicate with on the platform, plus the impending threat of checking and storing your ID, means I nuked my account with Discrub and will never be back.

[A comment I posted 9mo ago]

I fucking hate Discord and how it’s absorbed what should be forums.

When I’m creating a discussion online about a particular game or project, I’m looking to hear from the broader community over a longer term; not just limited to whomever happens to be online on this one specific platform at the time of posting.

People have different schedules, we’re not all online together at the same times; especially when you factor in timezones. Discord however makes it massively frustrating if not impossible to hold a discussion unless everyone you want to talk to is present and ready to read and reply now. Otherwise your conversation gets burried in the mess of other people having their own conversations and nobody wants to scroll through thousands of messages in the history of when they last logged on.

You can break out conversations into their own rooms, but that only goes so far and at that point you may as well just have a damn forum; that’s what they are for.

Then you get into the problem of repetition and searchability. People often run into common problems or ask the same questions; but with Discord, you’ve got to re-explain the same things every time they’re brought up, instead of just pointing the user to an old forum post that already solves their problem (they may have even found it themselves through a web search, saving them from even having to ask and waste people’s time. Discord isn’t indexed by search engines so old conversations/solutions are lost).

A group chat platform is not an acceptable replacement for a forum and I will die on that god damn hill.

I use Discord because of network effect (i.e. that's what people use, so I'm sort of stuck with it).

I refuse to install the app on my devices though. For PC, I use the web-based version. For mobile, I use Matrix bridging. The bridging only works for messaging, not voice/video, but I don't need that on my phone.

I don't know how to exist in servers that have more than about a dozen people.

Good for gaming voice chat and screen sharing. Terrible for killing online forums.

I help run a medium-sized Discord server, and community-supported software has made it a fun place to tinker.

That said, in an era of AI-generated content, I like the idea of chat rooms as places to interact more than I like Discord itself. I find more authenticity on Discord than on Reddit or other large social media platforms, but Discord itself isn't good on balance in terms of the bad actors in brings to my server versus the tools it gives us to handle them. It's a constant game of whack-a-mole with the spammers that harass my users.

I prefer to invest in chat rooms/servers than places like Lemmy because I know a successful Threadiverse would get swallowed by the Dead Internet. Async communication platforms have authenticity challenges chat rooms don't.

People fled one technology and company to get locked in by another technology and company. Instead of learning and going another route.

The naming of discords 'servers' is a hostile naming and misleading misuse especially to non tech people.

So yeah. Big fan.

it's where people are

building communities on there is easy because everyone has it

as an extrovert voice chats are indispensable for expanding and maintaining my social life

i wish it didn't suck as much but that's just how things are

I think it's a chat app popular with gamers. It works as intended.

I think it is a chat app that is holding on by a thread, that thread being the network effect. If that cracks and it offers something like Reddit's Community solutions but only to Search Engines, and it will collapse. Too much to manager for the server admins, to complicated for half of the casual users. Not enough income sources. Now it is leaning into ID Checking everyone and that had more than half its user base looking elsewhere.

Reminder that we are a month away from the date that Discord postponed age verification to in hopes that the uproar would blow over.

By and large, you don't go to Discord looking for a community, you find a community by other means and then join their Discord if they have one.

That said, there are ways to look through open Discord servers - those that don't need an explicit invite - and join that way.

A quick websearch turned up at least one site that offers such a service.

Caveats: What they get out of it I'm not sure. I'm not affiliated with any of them and I don't know whether they're connected to Discord the company or not. And if they're not, I don't know if those services screen for bad servers that try to hack your Discord account.

This is probably why finding the community first is the more usual route.

It’s slack for outside of work

Fancy irc

I have two types of servers I join: 1) small servers with friends where we voice chat while gaming, and 2) organizations where discord is their primary media method (e.g., Harbour Masters). It works great for both of those things.

It's really great for playing games (video and table top) with friends I have in real life. Using it for anything else is crazy and is used by crazy people.

I just use it for porn, I like short videos with sound that are categorized easily. Lots of servers exist that cater to that. I don't play multi-player games and any communication I have with people is either in person or through my phone.

it's okay, but I'd much prefer to not have to use it, i'd rather use rootapp.com (main place for guilded refugees).

I think the same of it as I do the other chat apps, I don't like the feeling of being online and reachable all the time, so I deleted them all along with Discord some time ago. My mental health has improved very much!

I’m in a couple servers for very specific interests; I prefer a BBS format, but can manage the IRC.

I don’t get to use it to much. I usually end up joining a server because of the particular theme (i.e. the “official” Dune discord). But each and every server has its own communities that basically overlap (i.e. there’s a music channel on every server). I can’t participate on the same kind of community on the 20+ servers I’m a part of. So I only visit a server for the original purpose I joined.

Also, the insane amount of spam and scams. Almost all the servers I’m a part of are muted.

Lastly, the walled garden. Information on discord is not indexed on search engines, so you don’t get the info there if you’re not a part of it.

I pretty much just use it because my friends use it. Voice chat, screen sharing, and text chat are all generally really good (though I'm not a member of any massive servers which I imagine would make the text chat a lot worse). If my friends swapped to something else, I'd go with them and never use Discord again.

It looks okay, but the actual UX isn't very good. Simple things like DMing a friend, or making/accepting a friend request are way more arcane than they should be.

I guess I can't really blame Discord itself, but I hate that it killed forums. Its lack of searchability makes it almost completely useless at doing what forums used to do, but almost everybody migrated anyway.

Imagine IRC, but monetized and full of pedophiles. Oh, it also has voice and video chat and not just text.

No clue, never used discord or telegram or whatsapp.

It works but a bunch of the UI is clunky. A bunch of stuff ends up there when people should've been using a wiki or at least forum, and as always it's pretty stupid to be centralizing on a proprietary platform, let alone one that's run like Discord.

That sounds like exactly my experience actually, originally I had joined for a single purpose server but when I lost interest in that thing, the general servers for example twitch streamers or just general severs I didn't have the best experience, but I also was a different person so maybe it might be better today who knows. I did get tempted to re install it to join to audio and music making focused communities but after all the headlines lately I don't think it's worth it