Discord is like an over bloated IRC, I wish IRC was more common these days because it is just better for chat. But using discord as a forum alternative is hilariously stupid.
They could’ve at least tried Matrix (or even XMPP)
Anyone that willingly uses Discord deserves their fate
The thing that I hate about discord as a replacement for forums is that it is completely closed off from the outside world. There’s no searching it except from within discord. You have to join the server to even try, and discord’s search sucks. It’s an informational black hole that contributes nothing to the larger internet.
In some cases, like threads, there’s no searching within Discord either. And let’s say you find someone asking your same question, right? They don’t list the replies the way 4chan does, so you’re stuck manually scrolling and reading and hoping someone said something relevant. I like Discord just fine for certain applications, but why did everyone decide to use it for everything??
Also, I can’t PM people unless I’m friends with them or we share a common server. What is that? There’s literally no privacy option to let me chat with people without also accepting them into my friends, a group which obviously has more permissions than strangers. ???
Also, also, I can’t ever find a Discord server for something I’m interested in. I have to go to Reddit to find a thread containing a Discord link. ??? why
The worst thing is archival sites cant get them.
I’m on a bunch of different discord servers and I fucking hate them. Just a giant fucking soup. I’d would actually rather they be subreddits. I would much much prefer them be forums or lemmy instances, but anything is preferable to discords.
Lemmy instances or IRC, either would be better.
Discord is like slack for outside of work
Yep… and it’s also an information blackhole in the long run.
Yeah, worst thing to ever exist. MSN messenger and Skype didn’t have this issue (and more but my point isn’t to endlessly list old messenging platforms). People used them as chat rooms and that was it. Turning them into crappy makeshift forums was the most stupid idea people could have come up with.
Kind of like a business having a Web Presence and when you Google them it’s a link to their Instagram. Garbage.
Talking about it here because I don’t know where else to talk about it, but has anyone else noticed that Reddit has gotten incredibly bad with bots lately? I no longer have an account on Reddit, but I still browse sometime, and came across this post:
Of the top 20 comments, only 4 had karma over 10,000, 0 had profile pics that weren’t snoos or NFTs, and all but 3 or so echoed the same vague message ‘see a therapist.’ Is it just me, or does it seem to anyone else that such cookie cutter comments are not the true thoughts of actual human beings…?
Regardless of whether it’s bots or just Reddit culture to have such spammy content, I’m incredibly pleased at least with how many instances require you to write a little message about why you want to join to prevent bots. I’ve just seen a lot more comments of actual substance here, idk
And OPs who forget to remove the ChatGPT blurb at the end of the post saying “this story has several themes reddit users get angry about so it is likely to drive engagement.“
You’re right
Also Redditors: “Hmmm I wonder why no women’s spaces are thriving on Lemmy.”
I like the sentiment of this post but let’s not forget that the buff, cool fedi users also seemingly downvoted women-oriented communities out of existence here. Not even WitchesvsPatriarchy survived. And let’s not forget that the reason downvotes are disabled on Blåhaj is because the buff, cool fedi users just couldn’t help themselves with downvote brigading there too.
I’m saying this as a simple user that just wants a platform to exist on, I don’t think most people give a shit who owns or is running the platform as long as it seems like a place where they’ll have a good time. Users make the platform, not anything else. So when people are shopping around for their next social media space, they’re looking more at what the users are posting and doing than the infrastructure or CEO.
To this day I haven’t tried Discord beyond a single conversation I was having with someone I met on Reddit at one point. But maybe women feel more at home there and maybe there’s more cool stuff for random users to look at there right now. And it’s probably just that simple.
Technical specifications aren’t going to be winning more users. Content is.
You were not here during the “man or bear” discussions. Those did not paint the platform in a good light
I honestly found the overall temperature of the room pretty comforting, but maybe I was just cherry picking?
Omg, I can just imagine and I’m glad that I wasn’t here. Probably wouldn’t have been able to keep my mouth shut and would probably be banned from a bunch of places by now. Especially world communities, I get the impression those moderators would’ve been very busy making sure no men’s feelings were hurt.
It makes me think that there’s a lot more teens and early 20 somethings on this platform than I thought. Because on Reddit, the majority of the “man or bear” stuff that I saw was through screenshots in feminist subs. And I got the impression that the people who were freaking out the most about it were teenagers and grown men that can’t think for themselves who treat the words of people like Rogan as gospel. And I don’t see too many Rogan fans around here.
Honestly, now that I think about it, that would make sense and explain a couple of little annoyances I’ve had here on this platform.
Not sure about the age demographics to be honest, I would think the average person on Lemmy is closer to 30-40 than teenager or 20
Oof. There goes that theory then lol. And yeah, I did originally get the impression based on my first couple of proper interactions here that it was an older crowd. Although honestly, it’s extremely hard to tell over text based communication. I think that often on these anonymous platforms, users just sort of assume that the person they’re speaking to is in a similar demographic to them. Because you can’t really detect age through a sentence or paragraph unless the person specifically brings up MS-DOS days or something. Our brains do a lot of filling in the gaps for us and that isn’t always reliable.
I’d actually be interested to see some sort of census or poll here that can reveal these things. Although I half expect that a lot of users here would be like “Don’t do the poll! They’re trying to track you and harvest your data for evil! - sent from my iPhone”.
Maybe some people like it when corporate screws them over. If people can like Billy Ray Cyrus they could be into all kinds of weird shit.
I think all of us have Friends in Low Places.
Trading one echo chamber for another is hardly an upgrade. Each has their pros and cons.
Frankly, if they can tolerate discord as their sole bit of online presence, I don’t think they’d fit in here all that well.
I’ve used dozens of IRCs in the past, but discord is the one I’ll never understand. And I don’t really know why I hate it so much.
Discord is fine instead of IRC I guess? But it’s not a forum. It’s chat rooms. Totally different thing and not an alternative to Reddit, is it?
Discord is an excellent chatroom. How the fuck did it replace almost all online forums?
Its a popular chatroom, but its very shit and I hate it. All I need you to do is send text, how are you using over 500MB of RAM?
No it’s not a replacement and probably just self promotion. I was just saying how Discord is the one IRC I could never get into.
It feels cramped and stifling. It’s good at one thing, and that thing is not 300 user chat sessions.
Enshittification is the promise of clout
I kinda get it. Money usually equals a degree of stability of service. And people value that when switching from something they considered stable.
You gotta realize, some of the people that wanted to leave reddit in 23 and heard about lemmy, they asked some version of “but what if the person running the instance closes it?”. They don’t see the equivalence that if reddit was essentially shutting down parts of its service, that it was no better. Or that it doesn’t really matter because you just switch to a new instance if you can’t run your own. Nobody should be relying on a third party as their sole repository of whatever it is that they want to preserve in that regard either.
So, I get it. Discord is rarely down, and never for long. It’s ubiquitous. It isn’t anything like the kind of threaded forum reddit and lemmy are, but that’s not necessarily the primary goal of everyone that uses them.
A few months after Rexodus, Kbin.social shut down, and even before that dmv.social running Lemmy software did as well, due to the waves of CSAM (just prior to the automated protections) - here is their goodbye message. For non-technical people especially, it can be really worrisome to potentially lose out on everything that they have built when a server chooses to go down.
Yup, that’s why we guide them to better practices, or try to. Back-up, back-up back-up.
It’s a legit concern, but one with a legit solution.
It’s not just that though: if you consider the needs of an actual content creator, even if not fully a self-styled “influencer” but like a step or two towards that I mean, they want to retain a method of keeping in contact with their followers. i.e. they want an address that people can bookmark and share with others, where they can remain reachable. Especially for X/Twitter migrating to Mastodon or Bluesky, but also for Reddit to Lemmy as well.
Coming to the Fediverse for them means having to learn how to self-host their own space. Which creative people tend to not want to do, even as technical people tend to be less creative in turn:-).
Ofc I’m not saying that Discord is a good answer to that issue - it’s decidedly not in fact, as it is not discoverable or searchable by the internet, and far worse in fact in requiring people to create an account and join a server to even see the content (iirc?). But I can see why they would at least consider it, when Lemmy’s stability is questionable to them.
Perhaps the best answer then would be to trot out the top 10-20 instances and report how many years they’ve remained open. Reddit itself was newer at some point, when people first switched to it.
Did reddit have influencers in the typical social media sense? I never noticed them in my communities. There were content creators obviously and some were more active sure, but still anonymous. Maybe some guerilla marketers but I don’t think the communities were generally driven by those the way other social media platforms are driven by influencers.
Probably not, though it has actual celebrities doing things like AMAs. Though I meant more like smaller time content creators offering their artwork. e.g. the Nathan Pyle comics are quite well-known, but would they remain so if the author posted exclusively to Lemmy and/or Mastodon and/or Friendica, but no longer to Reddit or X or Facebook? We might get the reposts here, but the actual content creators themselves go to where the audience is waiting to receive their works.
So if they became known by a certain handle, on let’s say kbin.social, and then they switched to DMV.social, and then they kept switching around to other places - except sometimes people try to impersonate them and already jump out ahead of them and grab their username on some other instance, … that’s not quite as ideal for their needs. Which helps explain why content creators gravitate towards more “stable” platforms that require less work to set up and stay on then e.g. having to self-host your own instance.
For people wanting to tell people about Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed, there is [email protected]
Subscribed! Thanks for sharing. I have been considering creating a new reddit account to help spread the good word to the unsaved masses.
does Discord provide any of the core functionalities of Subs, Posts, Comments, Up-/Downvotes?
Nope. When I left reddit, there was a lot of people pushing for discord like its a replacement. Its very much not the same thing. Its basically a chat room with a handful of extra features
And in a room with any measurable amount of people, it quickly becomes impossible to find anything or track conversations. I’m in a couple developer servers for some hosted apps, and goddamn is it painful when I actually need to use them for support. Hell, even my local friend group server with a dozen or so people can be annoying when it’s really popping.
I use discord to contribute as a dev for open source project and constantly needing to pull up years old conversations for reference. One of the few ways my close-to-perfect memory actually helps out is remembering who said what and when word for word so I know exactly what keywords to type into the search bar. Its such a good feeling being able to go "oh yeah speaking of the suggestion on adding ambient tracks for X thing one of our composers already made test tracks for that like two years ago. Let me hunt down the tracks they uploaded. Now who exactly was that composer again? I think it was X, let me browse through their chat history pinpoints it on first try
Doesn’t matter. It’s closed source, centralised and already enshittifying.
Even if it wasnt, i fail to see how going to Discord serves any of the purposes of reddit. So from my understanding you really have to go out of your way to choose Discord as a replacement over Lemmy. That is if you know Lemmy exists.
I mean you have servers, and a forums feature. But… no not really…
You can turn messages into threads so you get something that looks kinda sorta vaguely similar to posts if you squint.
I think the forums achieves this better. You could have the OP make a post on the forum, and then have emoji reactions be upvotes and downvotes. But it’s not really meant for it, not the same.
Forums also makes the search feature 10x worse than it already is. There is no way (that I could find) to search individual forum posts for keywords.
I often have to use the search feature to find people in severs, and half the time they don’t even show up. Then I go to @ them in a channel, and then they suddenly show up in the search again, it’s ridiculous
It can have up/downvotes, comments and posts, but it would have an algorithm less advanced that lemmy. You can technically have multiple subs
You can kinda make discord into a reddit alternative, but you can also make lemmy a discors alternative. Either way, its not easy or seamless
