What do you think about discord?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

“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

It went to shit, they have all kinds of evil groups on there like the 764 cult. I hope the government finds them all.

There were when I left 5 years ago. Mostly about "Nitro", but still.

Sounds like you need to find better servers.

Screen sharing/streaming works fine for me on Linux, using Bazzite.

government the people

Good call.

Ive had many good years on discord. I feel to old for it now. Im an UNC on every server and the people who are my age 29 are really weird and under socialised. There is also a ton of pedofiles and BPD demons so watchout.

Zulip is like a modern version of what you're describing

I've seen the "join our discord" thousands of times but in this current dystopia I never liked the negative connotations of the name "discord" so I always noped out.