I love discord for small communities, not that I have that many I’m in though. But friend groups, and niche topics. Places where the chat generally is a single discussion or two at a single point in time. And the voice chat is superb. Just drop in and out is convenient.
But it sure as fuck doesn’t compete with what reddit and Lemmy is doing.
To be honest even for small communities I just find discord an extremely difficult format to follow., especially because search of previous conversations is an afterthought (???).
I think it is easy to miss how powerful the reddit type thread structure is among the noise of how toxic and shitty reddit itself can be. I love lemmy because I think the reddit type thread structure is in most ways a direct upgrade to message boards/forums. The problem with message boards was that as a thread gets longer the probability increases steadily to 100% that the thread will be utterly derailed by people arguing over the most trivial detail of the conversation. This seems like a weird thing to empathize, but consistently I would find a thread on a message board that felt like a goldmine of interesting information and ALWAYS I would find to my consternation that the last three pages to the thread were people arguing over some stupid fact one of the commenters used incorrectly early on in the thread to make some ancillary side point.
The Reddit structure smoothly siphons off these side conversations and allows the wisdom of the crowd to direct the focus of the conversation through upvotes and downvotes. Does the Reddit structure get petty, toxic and judgemental? Yes, but I think it still qualifies as a near direct improvement on messageboards if the objective of the messageboard is to be a curated source of expert/niche conversations. Lemmy is awesome, you can learn so much just from reading quality comments sections.
I love discord for small communities, not that I have that many I’m in though. But friend groups, and niche topics. Places where the chat generally is a single discussion or two at a single point in time. And the voice chat is superb. Just drop in and out is convenient.
But it sure as fuck doesn’t compete with what reddit and Lemmy is doing.
To be honest even for small communities I just find discord an extremely difficult format to follow., especially because search of previous conversations is an afterthought (???).
I think it is easy to miss how powerful the reddit type thread structure is among the noise of how toxic and shitty reddit itself can be. I love lemmy because I think the reddit type thread structure is in most ways a direct upgrade to message boards/forums. The problem with message boards was that as a thread gets longer the probability increases steadily to 100% that the thread will be utterly derailed by people arguing over the most trivial detail of the conversation. This seems like a weird thing to empathize, but consistently I would find a thread on a message board that felt like a goldmine of interesting information and ALWAYS I would find to my consternation that the last three pages to the thread were people arguing over some stupid fact one of the commenters used incorrectly early on in the thread to make some ancillary side point.
The Reddit structure smoothly siphons off these side conversations and allows the wisdom of the crowd to direct the focus of the conversation through upvotes and downvotes. Does the Reddit structure get petty, toxic and judgemental? Yes, but I think it still qualifies as a near direct improvement on messageboards if the objective of the messageboard is to be a curated source of expert/niche conversations. Lemmy is awesome, you can learn so much just from reading quality comments sections.
Definitely. The comment structure is what got me into reddit in the first place. I love that Lemmy uses it as well.