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Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.
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this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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This is unironically on reddit right now. People lamenting a place like Lemmy doesn't exist.
I'm less worried about Discord, honestly.
IRC is literally right there.
The protocol itself could use a little modernizing (namely around privacy concerns), but it's still very relevant.
Discord was talking about going public, probably changing their profit incentives. My group and I were talking about setting up a Rocket Chat if that happened. But it has to have IRC compatibility, right? Can IRC provide real-time audio communications? Discord is a failover when in-game communication isn't working for some reason.
Discord is amazing for a step beyond group messages. I have no idea how it got into a roll as a "community tool".
I think it's because it's great for group messages too. SMS/MMS is kinda shit, especially when somebody has an iPhone and their iMessage interferes (seriously, enough of the 'loved an image' spam). IRC gets blocked on a lot of public networks because of its association with piracy, so that makes it less than reliable.
Discord is pretty full featured too, like IRC doesn't do group calls, and getting a group phone call going is a pain. Being able to have different channels is also super nice, because you can have a channel for, idk, birthday party planning to keep it from vanishing in the general daily chitchat. I've used it with roommates to get everybody on board with a grocery list before, because we all had Discord accounts anyways.
It's just useful enough as a community tool.
This is the answer.
For whatever complaints one might have about Discord (and they are legion), it does a really good job of packing a bunch of different functionality in one place and with a UI that's super easy to grasp and understand what does what and how that requires very little foreknowledge of what the thing is or its underlying mechanisms.
If I am completely new and pretty blank of what it is, Discord's pretty good at me being able to catch up quickly; it's got a good UI and, following that, functionality for a bunch of things related to communication. And, if I need a quick solution that just gets me going…that's gonna be pretty painless.
Exactly. Whats funny is facebook could have done this in like... 2010. Like I'm fairly certain I had "group pages" back then that were a very small number of people. But you're right, the channel thing is crazy useful. Like my one group has 3 people, but we've got like 50 topics. It's gotten to the point there are archives, ie: the "thanksgiving" channel moves from the "archive" group to "general" group around mid sept.
I've also been lucky enough to avoid having it be work related. Like I have slack for work, that notification noise is the devil, where as the discord notification noise means my buddy is posting pictures of his kid.
Yeah, but it shouldn't replace forums.
1000% agree. Like I use it for some spread out family (one server) and college friends. There's <5 people in each. I think eventually forums will adopt the fediverse infrastructure. I'm on an old school forum for my vehicle, and it's great. It's direct out of 2010, it wouldn't suprise me if those kind of sites brought in all the code that the fediverse runs off of. As a casual observer, that's really what lemmy seems like to me: "what if 2005 internet, where people managed their own webpages, but it ran on a common architecture that made it easier to cross-link with other sites if you wanted?"
I don't mind using it for larger teams, it can be great for organised communication such as dev teams!
But it shouldn't replace documentation.
(Also, Discord itself is a proprietary, censoring telemetry wasp nest, your FOSS dev team shouldn't be organised in it but Matrix, XMPP, IRC channels or something else open.)
Last I checked you can only thread a conversation one level down from the channel and that's it (when I last used it like 5 years ago).
To me that's practically unusable for what it's supposed to be. Slack even does a better job, in my opinion.
Discord is far worse in this context, though. Much of reddit is still publicly visible and is still indexed by some search engines, even if it could be better. Discussions from years ago are still visible and provide useful information to many (this is part of the reason "search term + reddit" became such a popular query template). When communities move to Discord, many of their conversations become completely private to anyone who isn't a member. The conversations move quickly and there is no easy way for people to reference past information. I get that people on Lemmy hate reddit and it's popular to circlejerk about it, but forums being replaced by things like Discord and Telegram that aren't equivalents at all has been much more damaging.
You make a really good point here. However, is that same anti-indexed nature a boon in the era of Ai site scraping.
Possibly, although it hasn't stopped people from doing it in the past.
Discord was never 'user-friendly'. It always gave me nerd, incel, neurodiverse, or weirdo vibes so not something I would miss much although I probably qualify as nerd, neurodiverse, and weirdo (but not incel, never that).
It definitely let people create insulated pockets. Is there a chat app that doesn't do that? Telegram?