An era of the internet is ending, and we’re watching it happen practically in real time. Twitter has been on a steep and seemingly inexorable decline for, well, years, but especially since Elon Musk bought the company last fall and made a mess of the place. Reddit has spent the last couple of months self-immolating in similar ways, alienating its developers and users and hoping it can survive by sticking its head in the sand until the battle’s over. (I thought for a while that Reddit would eventually be the last good place left, but… nope.) TikTok remains ascendent — and looks ever more likely to be banned in some meaningful way. Instagram has turned into an entertainment platform; nobody’s on Facebook anymore…
Sure, Discord chats are great, particularly for smaller communities/IRL friends. But as an alternative to subreddits or classic forums they’re absolute rubbish. Lemmy seems to be the only real game in that town for now.
Every time I see “to learn more, come hang with us in our Discord,” I die a little. Discord is a chat application. It isn’t meant to be a repository of knowledge for your app/service. That’s what your website is for. And it’s not a substitute for a proper knowledgebase or documentation either.
This, I’ve seen a lot of communities learn that the hard way, Discord is terrible as a knowledge base.
I had a fight over this. For me, it was natural to have a distinction between chat, an instant, forgetful and private messaging platform, and websites, a more permanent and open repository.
Some disagreed hard and insisted discord was working just fine for them. Am I becoming the dinosaur?
For people who use discord a lot (and to be totally honest, I’m one of them, I even ended up changing the liftoff theme colour to the old discord logo colour by instinct) it feels like it’s just as easy to use. But you’re right, it’s not a replacement, and it can be hard to keep up with no easy way to scroll through feeds or anything similar, no matter how much discord tries to implement them. It will forever be, at its core, a messaging app.
So I think it boils down to how used to using discord you are. If you’re going to discord to replace reddit, you are bound to be extremely disappointed by the results. It’s not designed to do that. And a lot of people aren’t realizing this.
As I saw it, Discord is a replacement for IRC (for text) + Mumble (for voice), and they succeeded despite problems all proprietary platforms share. Now, I can understand subreddits (or communities now) having a chatroom like Discord for contingencies, but replacing forums?
And discord is slowly moving towards a similar level of corporate takeover and shifting it to “keep up” with every competitor app they can imagine. So I don’t even know how long that one will last.