What do you think about discord?

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.

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

Behind the scenes the code calls them "guilds".

I used IRC a lot back in the day and its shocking how little of that interaction I see anywhere on Discord. It's either nobody talking or literally hundreds just spamming messages.

I use it for gaming with friends but that's really all I've found useful. It helped me nab a PS5 back in the day because of a price watching group and I've found a few WoW communities that have group finder channels that can be good but that's about it.

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

It’s slack for outside of work

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

forums still work...

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

They still work, but voting forms like Lemmy tend to handle larger audiences than non-voting ones.

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.

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.

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.