discord makes hosting a real-time online place for most communities of all sizes very easy. it also doubles as a free cross-platform messaging app with a massive userbase. as the top-level GP posted, it mostly has a superset of the features of other community/messaging platforms (at the cost of searchability and data ownership/privacy).
as a student, I'm in discord servers for friend groups, school clubs, unofficial classroom servers, game communities, fanbases, etc - anything that can benefit from conversations organized into different channels is usually turned into a discord server.
when I think "how can I take this group of people interested in the same thing to gather together online?", the alternatives that come up are:
- facebook (too linked to real life identity, also not really great for separating conversations into specific channels to my understanding)
- reddit/forums (which can compliment a discord server in being more searchable/async, but in no way rival Discord's real time text/voice chat)
- mumble/teamspeak/skype/matrix (largely just has a subset of discord features)
- slack/microsoft teams (pretty much solely designated for work and not at all marketed as a general purpose communication solution)
I don’t know, I’ve tried joining some discord communities, and they were all like slack with trigger-happy channel creation, in each channel it was really hard to even grasp what the conversation was about because of emoji and meme flooding.
Maybe it’s me getting old, but while I remember quite vividly that IRC regulars liked to flood with emoticons just as much, in five minutes I’d know what the conversation was about. In discord… not so much. And there’s the whole voice layer I didn’t even touch. It’s too chaotic and demanding full immersion, so I just noped out of there.
(And there’s the whole aspect of Discord actually owning it all, and banning you discord-wide if you blow your nose funny.)
The idea of using discord as a medium for conversations you mean to log and refer to later seems like bollocks in the light of above. Also the idea of having work discussions there seems to be bollocks too and indistinguishable from Slack in 99% aspects imaginable.
as a student, I'm in discord servers for friend groups, school clubs, unofficial classroom servers, game communities, fanbases, etc - anything that can benefit from conversations organized into different channels is usually turned into a discord server.
when I think "how can I take this group of people interested in the same thing to gather together online?", the alternatives that come up are:
- facebook (too linked to real life identity, also not really great for separating conversations into specific channels to my understanding) - reddit/forums (which can compliment a discord server in being more searchable/async, but in no way rival Discord's real time text/voice chat) - mumble/teamspeak/skype/matrix (largely just has a subset of discord features) - slack/microsoft teams (pretty much solely designated for work and not at all marketed as a general purpose communication solution)