Discord

[Necrosia]

Hows your relationship with discord? Do you use it often? Are you on many servers? Do you check all of them? Or are you more of a server collector despite never accessing them again? Please share your usage habits, problems you encountered etc, I would like this to be a general discord topic specially because I know some people dislike discord because its a centered software with some issues but imo it's the lesser evil before we have to get into other esoteric options.

  


Now, regarding my own experiencie, I am currently facing a dilemma. Another forum I partake has a discord server, the server is very small and cozy, its used mainly as a place for a quick chat, post some memes and life updates, we are talking about 20 active people max with around 5 talking at the same time on a very active day. The discord is supposed to be only a side-dish to the forum and for the recurring users it is used like that except that every now and then some new person will join only the discord, chat a bit, post a meme and never join the forum at all. Maybe I am overreacting but lately this has been bothering me because it creates a sense of clutter and disrupts the original purpose of the server. I don’t mind forum users joining discord only to silently watch, I also know I cannot force people to be active nor I wish to do it but the discord should be a side-dish and not the main course and the discord-only users are not enforcing that fact.

I feel like I finally start to understand why yesterweb closed they discord server claiming that (among many other things) that it was going offtopic and losing its purpose, nobody is against a casual chat but its different when random people start to join only for the chat aspect.

[levya]

for a while I was going through a cycle of feeling lonely -> join a discord server -> post an introduction -> never post anything else -> leave. to me it feels too much like going to a party where I don't know anyone so it's really hard for me to join in any conversations. it doesn't help that I'm super shy and find instant messaging with strangers overwhelming.

I've pretty much given up on joining new discord servers unless someone I actually know invites me to join one (which hasn't happened yet haha).

I much prefer posting in forums where I can take my time with what I want to say~

[Cele]

I'm only active on a couple of small servers. I talk on them because the people are my friends and I love them and would never want to leave, I'd be too lonely without online friends anyways. We talk about anything and well I've met some of the people irl in other countries etc. They're real friends, just far away.

[drakonic]

Been on Discord since 2016, might as well offer some of my thoughts

Yeah, I believe that once you cross a certain threshold of users, a Discord server becomes really unhealthy to be in. So many people, so many chats to check. It's pretty much impossible to make any meaningful connections, and really hard to have proper discussion. Even with a fraction of the member count online, things become blazing fast and impossible to keep up with (and I can't imagine how hard it must be to moderate such a server).
In my opinion, that threshold is ~50 users. Might be different for people with different comfort levels.

As for my personal experience...

It was and is a fairly nice IM platform. However... They've been paywalling more and more in the last couple years, and generally starting to provide a dis-service to its users, its venture capital investors motivating the company to become more and more anti-user. It has also obviously shot up in popularity since 2016 - it is now the place online to chat and meet with people. Network effect and all that...
When I joined, it was much harder to get locked into it - not many people had an account on there. There was only one server I really joined at the time, it had like 20 people at most, it was just my friend group and friends of friends.
We hadn't really used any service like it when we were first trying it out - a nice, cool interface, bots that could do all sorts of stuff, quite a bit of customization, multiple chatrooms within a single "place"...

Then, well, it did kinda sorta take over and become the main way I communicate with people irl and online. I did use to recommend it to people and stuff. I joined quite a lot of servers. I was angry that my middle school classmates insisted on using Facebook Messenger instead of Discord, which was cleaaarly superior.

And what about now, when the platform is so widely used? Well... It started feeling less like instant messaging, and more like social media.
Prior to, let's call it my "social media rejection phase", I saw it mostly as a good thing - when I wanted to get to know some new people interested in a particular topic, I could go look for a server with people interested in that. (I have always feared and hated large servers, though, so I usually looked on tumblr or something else that wasn't one of those discord server listing sites.)

Now, though... The cons far outweigh the pros for me. I still hang around a couple servers occassionally, and I do need Discord to communicate with my classmates and teachers [sic], but ultimately my goal is to stop using it entirely.
I just can't bear to see all the catering to the "content creator" culture, the paywalling, the privacy abuse, the anti-user attitude of the platform anymore. And, yeah, scrolling through channels does waste a bit of my time.

How do I intend to pull this off? Well, I found an alternative that's good enough for me. It's a protocol called Matrix. It's got almost all the features Discord has, and is a protocol, not a platform, meaning it can't really be centrally controlled or bought or anything, and you have more control over how you use it. Crucially for me, the protocol can be bridged to platforms like Discord - I don't have to lose contact with my friends to stop using Discord! (Yeah, yeah, my messages are still going out to the platform's servers, but at least it's more on my terms than theirs.)

One thing I find really comforting is that I'm not the only person I personally know that shares my sentiments about not trusting Big Tech platforms (I think it's fair to call Discord that at this point), my online friends also have similar concerns, and are trying out Matrix.

Irl, though... I get strange looks when I meet someone and I say I don't use Discord or Facebook Messenger, heh. I don't mind it too much though, there's always the ol' phone number if I want to stay in touch with someone.

While I personally am avoiding Discord, I want to say this: do your best to not burn bridges, if you are also concerned about Discord's effect on your mental health/wider society/whatever and want to leave the platform. Unfortunately, platform lock-in is a really hard thing to fight... Though, like you say in your starting post, Necrosia, Discord is the lesser evil of the popular IM options out there, so using it isn't that bad.
Discord may not be golden, but at least they aren't Facebook...

[sig]

It work fiiiiine as a slightly more involved group chat for my close friends, but I also don't swear any loyalty to it: if a better alternative arises and it becomes practical to jump ship with all/most of my friends, then I might consider moving over to something else. I don't really have a problem with my Discord usage when comparing it to social media like Reddit and Twitter but that's because the main usage for me is either talking to my friends in a single server (just chatting without making use of most of Discords plethora of community management features) or having to navigate some server for information that COULD HAVE BEEN A WIKI!!! 

   
It pisses me off to no end!! Put your project's information in a seperate, easily searchable repository!! A general website, a wiki, I don't care!! Anything but a fucking instant messaging service!! They've added some features like topics or threads in some big servers I've seen but every single time it boils down to another channel for chat messaging, bloating the whole experience even more!!!
   

Anyway Discord, yeah, sure. I've tried joining larger servers but I really just don't have it in me to become a Discord Denizen and I only use it to keep up with my gamer friends who play games.

[doubleincision]

Discord is "fine" for the way i use it: i'm only in tiny group chats with close friends and i run one small server that's been going since 2017. i would like to migrate away from it because there's really no reason we have to use Discord, but the problem is a lot of my friends are pretty tech-illiterate so i would have to do a lot of teaching and explaining to successfully move everyone onto something like Matrix

[graveyardsoup]

I have sort of a weird way of using Discord so my opinion might be different. I use it like some sort of advanced notes app where I have a personal server that I am the only member in and use it to make notes to myself, create lists, share photos between my devices, etc. I saw someone else online with this idea a while back and it's really worked for me. I like that it's searchable, so if I drop a link for something I want to remember I can tag it and search for it later. Bonus is that I can use it interchangeably between my phone, iPad and computers so it's really helpful for art related things. It's maybe not the most practical solution but it works great for me. My girlfriend and I also have a server for just the two of us that we organize similarly with channels for things like grocery lists, recipes, reminders, etc.

[doubleincision]

I have sort of a weird way of using Discord so my opinion might be different. I use it like some sort of advanced notes app where I have a personal server that I am the only member in and use it to make notes to myself, create lists, share photos between my devices, etc. I saw someone else online with this idea a while back and it's really worked for me. I like that it's searchable, so if I drop a link for something I want to remember I can tag it and search for it later. Bonus is that I can use it interchangeably between my phone, iPad and computers so it's really helpful for art related things. It's maybe not the most practical solution but it works great for me. My girlfriend and I also have a server for just the two of us that we organize similarly with channels for things like grocery lists, recipes, reminders, etc.

i do this too! i call it my Personal Dump. it's mostly for links or shopping lists; things that aren't sensitive information. i also have a channel for fake band names that me and my friends think of, because we do this thing where whenever a weird or funny phrase happens in normal conversation we say "that's a great band name", so i started saving them. my personal favorites are OSHA Violations, Slow Demise For Beauty, HYPERFIXATIONZ, Flesh Mechanics, Nonviolent Pleasures, Genetic Apathy, Cadaver Thing...i have tons of these, i should put them on my site sometime

[princemaggots]

I like it for talking to my friends (particularly bc the channels are a great feature for multiple roleplays), but I'm not a massive fan of bigger servers (above a "friend group"/club level of 20-30 people). I'm in a few, but I often end up having to just mark all the channels as read whenever I get too busy to read them. I also try to avoid servers that have over 100 members generally unless they're not super active, just so I can keep up with the server somewhat.

I have sort of a weird way of using Discord so my opinion might be different. I use it like some sort of advanced notes app where I have a personal server that I am the only member in and use it to make notes to myself, create lists, share photos between my devices, etc. I saw someone else online with this idea a while back and it's really worked for me. I like that it's searchable, so if I drop a link for something I want to remember I can tag it and search for it later. Bonus is that I can use it interchangeably between my phone, iPad and computers so it's really helpful for art related things. It's maybe not the most practical solution but it works great for me. My girlfriend and I also have a server for just the two of us that we organize similarly with channels for things like grocery lists, recipes, reminders, etc.

I also do this as well! I use mine primarily for an online "notebook" basically, testing bots, and writing character information down occasionally. I also have a couple channels to create fake character chats (using Pluralkit).

[Cobra!]

I'm not a fan of Discord at all, but as a game developer, I need to use it. I'm in many game developer networking servers, as well as servers for specific programs and game engines I use. I would love to disconnect entirely from the platform, but I can't.

For some programs, such as GIMP, Blender and Godot, forums and Matrix channels exist, but for most stuff, it's Discord or bust.

[NacreousDreams]

I like using it to talk with my friends, I keep in close touch with my two besties on there. But larger servers, I'm a bit iffy on; I tend to forget to interact with them unless I've got something going on that's somewhat relevant to them. And I don't like unmuting them because if I do, I'd never get a wink of sleep!

They have a lot of nice features that I'll never use because I don't want to spend a lot of money. Meanwhile, to get the stuff I really care about, like heavy CSS customization of the layout, I have to use a tool like "BetterDiscord." But it breaks with each new update of Discord, and on Linux Mint, I'm forced to update whenever one pops up (at least with the way I installed it). So that's fun.

I get the impression that the Omniverse, a roleplaying forum I go on, is heavily limited by its Discord server because people go there instead of the forum to chat. I'm literally only posting this message because I was in the MelonLand chatbox and thought "yeah, let's make a post". The OV has a chatbox, but no one uses it because the Discord server is where all the conversation is. In fact, the forum looks more dead because you only ever see recent forum posts in the chatbox, never people actually talking; I think it risks warding away potential new users who think the forum's less lively than it is. For that reason, I get the sneaking suspicion that Discord is doing a lot of harm to the forum's ability to grow, and I'll hold that against it wholesale.

[Frost Sheridan]

discord is interesting... i both love it and hate it at the same time. as an IM and calling service, it's by far the best one i've ever used, due to how many nice features there are and how well voice/video/screen-sharing just work, especially in comparison to skype, which i used to use a lot before discord was a thing. the format of discord servers and how they can be divided up into channels with different purposes and permissions is great for organizing communities and planning events. lots of vrchat clubs/raves/music festivals use discord's features to plan their events and it usually works out great!

however, the fact that it's a centralized platform does bother me a litle bit, as a huge chunk of my online communication is at the whim of a Big Tech company that doesn't seem to care much about maintaining a good, clean user experience anymore. (also, the discord client barely runs at all on my windows XP computers so i'm forced to use a more modern machine to chat with friends. ) i would really like to do more chatting on decentralized protocols (xmpp. matrix, irc, etc.) instead, but to be totally honest, they all kinda suck in comparison to discord's usability and featureset, so getting friends interested in them has been pretty much impossible.

one thing that i don't like about the discord server format is how easy it is to make one that's unwieldy, complex, and overwhelming. i'm sure we've all had the experience of joining a new server and getting immediately overwhelmed by a huge mess of 500 channels spread across a dozen categories, all with unread message indicators that want you to click on them right now, all while trying to trudge your way through the massive #rules-and-faq channel and countless role menus. also, you got DMed by 3 different bots when you joined, all sending you a generic automated welcome message, and they will continue to spam your DMs every time you select a new role. it's exhausting and makes joining new servers not fun at all!

   
It pisses me off to no end!! Put your project's information in a seperate, easily searchable repository!! A general website, a wiki, I don't care!! Anything but a fucking instant messaging service!! They've added some features like topics or threads in some big servers I've seen but every single time it boils down to another channel for chat messaging, bloating the whole experience even more!!!
   

i recently found a couple of posts on cohost that detail the horrible experience of trying to get support for an open-source project that only uses discord for information. they're a pretty great read: https://cohost.org/cathoderaydude/post/474632-someone-asked-in-the

[cybermage]

I really hate discord, you can be banned just for posting the wrong meme or just for piss off the wrong user (even by accident), the majority if servers are just cliques and I hate how people are stopping to using forum because of this site

[Skykristal]

I dislike discord and most chat Apps. They give me anxiety.. the fact that you can see the other person typing, the feeling that you have to answer.. quick and short responses etc. etc. Is absolutely not my thing and the fact that it is required or expected by pretty much everyone is very annoying to me. I have a convo, email, comment, DM on a website and then ppl ask for my discord handle ALL THE TIME. I just don't want to use it and a lot of people don't seem to respect that wish.. which makes me dislike it even more. I don't have an issue with family and friends. But strangers make me uncomfy.

I actually used discord a bit before and when I did I just felt awkward, out of place and just wanted to leave... Kinda the feeling of when a group of friends are having fun and talk and you just stand there not fitting in. The main thing I often did was sharing my art in Channels, hoping not to get random replies who ask me stuff I'm uncomfortable with...

Yea well, I experience all this on Discord. , Or apps like Telegram. I don't feel this anywhere else. This forum, other forums, email messages, DMs and so on. All fine. But discord and I won't be friends.

Also discord used to always block my images I wanted to post. Because of nsfw. The safety filter algorithm or whatever this is called definitely doesn't work well. It was pretty frustrating.

[wygolvillage]

Discord is really fun for smallish friend groups and awful for anything larger, in my opinion. I hate being in larger servers because it feels like everyone is talking and no one is having a conversation. It's like everyone is drowned out by design.