I spent years, but I didn’t find any interesting acquaintances, and I came across such people that I thought I was in the Stone Age, I seemed to be dumb by 25 percent at least when I communicated in discord or I was terribly bored, it’s difficult to explain, but that’s about how I can describe my experience.
I don’t know how to exist in servers that have more than about a dozen people.
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.
Screen sharing/streaming works fine for me on Linux, using Bazzite.
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).
I only use it to communicate with people who I already know or are in the same social circles as me. I do not use it to meet new people.
It’s a useful took for organizing server wide events and playing with friends.
I hate the SAAS enshittification it’s undergoing with the rest of the web. Having to pay for profile customizations shouldn’t be a thing. I remember editing my Neopets profile with HTML when I was 12. No paying, just learning how to tinker.
I really hate how groups are using it as a file storage system instead of running websites that are indexed and easier to find. But that’s on them.
Discord Nitro is no where near as valuable as they claim it is. The profile templates are garbage, all they do is obstruct your profiles with choppy animations, I mean who’d want to pay $8 for this shit on top of paying however much Nitro is?
As far as going into other servers, you’ll find yourself either in dead servers that only serve for minecraft purposes or just inane boring stuff. Those or you’ll find yourself in overcrowded servers with annoying bots wanting verification and overzealous moderation staffs.
When used strictly as a messenger/video call/game/irc-like program, it’s okay. I kinda like how there is all of that in one than in past days where you needed like 7 different programs. Although, it wouldn’t hurt to have alternatives that also provide the same benefits.
Oh and the Discord staff themselves are shady ass people with questionable morals and judgment.
As a Discord user, I don’t hate it but ever since lockdown, I’m getting up of many the larger communities are on Discord. It’s really frustrating when the community in question would be whatever product and only way contact custom service is through there and not email (Looking at you, PixelFX) and open-source project where only way to contract devs or ask for help is through Discord as the search engine on Discord is terrible.
The only reason why I still on Discord despite my annoyance with that chat app is that most people are on there instead of places like Matrix, XMPP or IRC. The three I mention tend to have more a techy-nerd userbase which nothing wrong with that but it hard finding as much niches compare to 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.
By and large, you don’t go to Discord looking for a community, you find a community by other means and then join their Discord if they have one.
That said, there are ways to look through open Discord servers - those that don’t need an explicit invite - and join that way.
A quick websearch turned up at least one site that offers such a service.
Caveats: What they get out of it I’m not sure. I’m not affiliated with any of them and I don’t know whether they’re connected to Discord the company or not. And if they’re not, I don’t know if those services screen for bad servers that try to hack your Discord account.
This is probably why finding the community first is the more usual route.
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.
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.
I help run a medium-sized Discord server, and community-supported software has made it a fun place to tinker.
That said, in an era of AI-generated content, I like the idea of chat rooms as places to interact more than I like Discord itself. I find more authenticity on Discord than on Reddit or other large social media platforms, but Discord itself isn’t good on balance in terms of the bad actors in brings to my server versus the tools it gives us to handle them. It’s a constant game of whack-a-mole with the spammers that harass my users.
I prefer to invest in chat rooms/servers than places like Lemmy because I know a successful Threadiverse would get swallowed by the Dead Internet. Async communication platforms have authenticity challenges chat rooms don’t.
it’s where people are
building communities on there is easy because everyone has it
as an extrovert voice chats are indispensable for expanding and maintaining my social life
i wish it didn’t suck as much but that’s just how things are
and not just online stuff! it’s also really good for keeping peeps informed bout locals events too!!!
i can’t imagine trying to form a genuine general community with anything else
matrix? jank as fuck and only nerds will put up with using it. signal? no support for multiple channels. telegram? well a lot of furries use that too but nowhere near as universally as discord i’ve found
there really aren’t any better options
It went to shit, they have all kinds of evil groups on there like the 764 cult. I hope the government finds them all.
governmentthe peopleGood call.
Hate it but currently the online doable voice chat for crossover gaming PC and Xbox. We really need a Teamspeak-App for Xbox
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.
Reminder that we are a month away from the date that Discord postponed age verification to in hopes that the uproar would blow over.
