Discord for large communities is dumb as shit. There's literally too many people that real communication becomes impossible unless you move to DMs or an empty room.
Discord is just an AOL chat room. Great for short-term conversations among 20 or fewer people. It's not a good place to store your FAQ. It's not a good place for large teams. It's not a good place for anything searchable. It's transactional. And I don't know why people treat it otherwise.
Yeah, I hate discord for many reasons but the primary reason is that I just think it is a terrible place to have a conversation. All the channels I see are always dominated by really low quality effort interaction, interesting conversations just get drowned out and lost by someone sharing another meme or responding to someone else's low effort meme.
As someone with pretty intense ADHD, Discord is just so fragmented with so many channels each with their own conversations all fracturing out in different directions with no capacity to keep a handle on it. I hate it.
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.
Right and when you step back and think about it, why create a conversation system that demands so much admin for moderators? A reddit-like system obviously still desperately needs good human moderation but the moment to moment guidance of conversation focus doesn’t require a human mod to always interject to refocus things, just an engaged and genuine audience.
God I can't stand servers that are Nazis for that. Guess what...natural conversation will change topics over time. I'm sorry I can't keep up which of your 100 channels I need to jarringly break away from the convo and hop into whenever the topic even remotely, slightly drifts from what it started with. Discord channel Nazis don't understand how human conversation works.