I spent years, but I didn’t find any interesting acquaintances, and I came across such people that I thought I was in the Stone Age, I seemed to be dumb by 25 percent at least when I communicated in discord or I was terribly bored, it’s difficult to explain, but that’s about how I can describe my experience.
It went to shit, they have all kinds of evil groups on there like the 764 cult. I hope the government finds them all.
Sounds like you need to find better servers.
“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.
[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.
Forums do feel a bit dated now. Instead of a forum you could make a Lemmy instance/community.
I’d argue that Lemmy is a type of Internet Forum. At least far more so than Discord is. It’s just far more distributed and less focused on a specific topic, while still maintaining the ability to hold longer form individual conversations that are indexed, open to the public, and searchable.
No need to argue the obvious.
forums still work…
They still work, but voting forms like Lemmy tend to handle larger audiences than non-voting ones.
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.
I don’t know how to exist in servers that have more than about a dozen people.
Yeah the whole thing feels a bit… Messy? Like it feels like when you get the tail end CC of a 40+ reply email chain at work and you need to figure out what’s going on. In many ways it feels like email to me, actually. The text based stuff anyway. Searching is God awful, there’s like 100–1000 messages per day you cannot possibly keep up with… But people are using it as a replacement for their entire community, which is just bad. I had to submit a bug report on a game’s Discord once, it was even worse than doing the same through Twitter.
I like the voice chat functionality though. Wish that screen sharing / streaming worked on Linux.
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.
Good for gaming voice chat and screen sharing. Terrible for killing online forums.
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.
Behind the scenes the code calls them “guilds”.
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.
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
and not just online stuff! it’s also really good for keeping peeps informed bout locals events too!!!
i can’t imagine trying to form a genuine general community with anything else
matrix? jank as fuck and only nerds will put up with using it. signal? no support for multiple channels. telegram? well a lot of furries use that too but nowhere near as universally as discord i’ve found
there really aren’t any better options
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.
