this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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Asklemmy
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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!
I do appreciate that nuance but IRC (as of last I checked - admittedly it's been about a decade since I was habitually connected to IRC) is not really like that despite fitting essentially the same description.
That makes sense, I can see that.
Yeah I expect given how long ago IRC's heydey was, we're talking about quite a different demographic. Everyone I know who used it was on the nerdy side (this includes me, it's not an insult!), whereas things like Discord with their modern interfaces make things easy enough that for example I run a crafting community on there full of old ladies sharing their cross stitch.
Anything that attracts huge numbers of regular folks like that is gonna be a target for trolls and spammers and suchlike, so without good moderation a public server can spiral down quite fast in my experience. Add to all this the ever-increasing hostility and us-vs-them of people on the internet in general, and ugh.
I'm sure there are plenty of lovely spaces out there too ofc, it's just finding them that's the trick :)
Thanks for the followup - I have to agree and I suppose the takeaway is I (possibly) picked the wrong servers so far.
Yeah seems so, it's pretty ok though. It tracks what is new and your mentions so it's vaguely like a messaging app instead of IRC.
There are a lot of game development communities there. It’s basically a cheap, more public alternative to Slack.
I personally think the best way to use discord is to create a server and invite people to it as you meet them online. For me, it’s gaming that connects me with people. My wife and I meet people that we like and want to play with more, and so we invite them. This usually results in getting invited to other small community servers.
I can't even get past the user interface at Discord. Rarely have I felt so uninvited to participate, even as the site aggressively invites me to participate.