I really wish all the communities I visit on Discord would switch to using Discourse. Do you think this latest change will cause communities to switch over? Or is it just too easy to use Discord and to hard to use Discourse?
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I donāt think itās necessarily about ease of use, itās more about ease of setting a thing up, and getting people to adopt the new place.
For discord, thereās one platform and anyone can start a āserverā and then create āchannelsā and issue invitations. And as far as I know, itās free.
Itās true that Discourse now has a much easier to operate setup for custom domainsā¦ but the initial admin still has to choose and pay a hosting company, or pay someone for a hosted solution.
And the admin needs to understand local law, and the users need to trust the admin to keep the place going.
Migrating communities is difficult, and (I would say) never 100% successful - some people will migrate, others wonāt.
Another question might be, where will Discord communities goā¦ whatapp groups? signal groups? threads? bluesky? Many choices.
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This might be changing in the very near future 
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For FOSS communities none of those are a good option.
From a user side I prefer Discourse without question over Discord. But from the setup side it is more of a commitment. And from the moderation/management side too.
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The big problem with Discord is itās mostly forgettable duplicated ephemeral chat spam
Why anyone uses it as a core customer or community support platform I donāt know.
Affinity was recently bought and they moved support from an ok forum platform to Discord.
What a terrible thing to do. 
Customers were not happy and this ended a good run for Affinity picking up people unhappy with Adobe.
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Maybe the list of administrators and moderators with real-world experience who volunteer to help new sites could be made active again, or a new one started. For certain sites, Iād be willing to toss my hat in the ring.
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This just posted on Hacker News
Higher is better in the table
Higher numeric scores are better in the table.
In the Discourse section it notes
Best for: anything but real-time chat, really.
I know that on the OpenAI forum the chat feature is used daily by those with access.
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Except that higher is not higher in the table 
A bit mean they didnāt order that by score descending. Was the order just arbitrary? 
Have access but have no time to watch it - thatās why chat is inferior to forums. Probably great for some applications like āduring the event/game/livestreamā chat ā¦ but otherwise ā¦ chat in general is just an ephemeral disorganised mess.
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Thanks for that. I think itās essential reading, really, because itās an outsiders view of what Discourse offers and what value that delivers. Itās also well worth understanding where people see the value in the other offerings.
Quite interesting that it misses the Discourse Chat feature. Maybe most Discourse instances donāt use it much? (Itās not enabled on mine.)
Edit to add a couple of pull quotes:
Anyone using Discord needs an exit strategy. The trick is to find a landing spot that users will tolerate, and that allows the community to continue in some fashion. Change is loss, and that is excruciatingly true for community platforms. Any switch comes with an attrition rate, meaning the destination better be worth the cost in headcount.
Choosing a platform on which to build a community is just the beginning. Itās vitally important, yet insufficient to a communityās success. Tools do not make a culture; the people engaging on it do.
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The author is actively discussion over on Mastodon:
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Perhaps now would be a good opportunity to focus the chat more specifically for the Discord ārefugeesā. 
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Iām really not clear on what that would mean. I guess I use chat off-Discourse for personal synchronous communication with individuals or personal groups. Even though I use chat on a Discourse forum, I really treat it just like a more ephemeral version of PMs. So I donāt know what more people would need.
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Yeah this is the case as far as we can seeā¦ not all sites have it enabled, and most sites that have it enabled use it at a pretty low volume (though there are a small number of sites that use it quite a lot).
I donāt think there are many (any?) cases where chat is being used primarily, so itās not unusual that weāre still considered a forum first.
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Affinity user here ā still baffled and upset about them dropping their forum & know Iām not alone. A third-party forum quickly spun up and has quite a bit of traction, but it uses āWoltLab Suiteā. Better than Discord, at least. 
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Iām pretty sure this was a discussion before, but Discourse doesnāt feel like a drop in replacement for Discord even when you can selfhost for free. One is an instant messenger, the other is a public forum.
You could also argue that these changes are for NSFW communities only (and who wants to run a public forum for that?) but who knows if theyāre going to expand it later? This feels like a strategic attempt to not have the entire site angry at them yet but something doesnāt feel right.
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Well, this might be one reason among many others:
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My friends and I regularly chat on a Discord server and some are unpleased with the upcoming changes. Weāll see how it really goes of course, especially since Discord allegedy said they evaluate the age range of existing users based on their content, which should put all of us in the 60-90 years old range. I suspect nobody will leave if the changes have no direct consequence on how we use Discourse.
But nonetheless, some of us discussed about chatting on a self-hosted app instead. I donāt know anything about mattermost and other chat apps, but I do know Discourse, and that coud perhaps do the job if there was a way to configure an instance to the chat as the default communication feature.
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This is not exactly that (since it locks-in on chat) but Iām still mentioning it here GitHub - discourse/discourse-just-chat: A plugin that hides everything that isn't chat.
Not an official Discourse supported plugin ā but could be interesting for some use cases
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When Taggart first posted this list I replied to point out that āDiscourseā¦ is primarily a forum, not a real-time chat appā can be read as āDiscourse doesnāt have chat.ā While he clearly appreciates Discourse, so far he hasnāt chosen to amend that bit.
But another Mastodon user noted that āDiscourse works as a forum, but it is absolutely not helpful to my gaming groups that need good STT with PTT support, and ability to stream your screen with low frictionā which reminded me that Discord started out with gamers before catching on as a freeā¦ thingā¦ for other groups.
So Discourse may not be a solution for gamers who want real-time gaming features, but for many communities, looking for a ādrop in replacement for Discordā is a flawed premise.
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Exactly!
Discord started as a natural next-generation app for TeamSpeak 3 users, and this is its first core audience. Itās free in a world where TeamSpeak admins had to obtain licenses and pay for servers.
Only after that, as with any platform that offers anything for free, it starts getting abused into other use cases, some who are even adopted officially by Discord. Those include pure text chat, customer support, video conferencing, forums, image generation interface, etc.
Discourse is already better than Discord for some of those use cases, like customer support and forums, and a worse alternative at others, like chat and gaming comms. Also, it simply doesnāt cover some use cases, like video conferencing.
I see Discourse covering more and more of Discordās use cases over time, be it with voice chat with Resenha - Add Discord-style Voice Rooms to Your Community 
or with live streaming with Discourse Video Stream 
, and simple changes like making a chat room the home page can help many communitiesā migration be less traumatic, but I donāt think we plan on being a 1-to-1 replacement any time soon, as there are simply too many use cases that people abuse into any free tool.
Also, I donāt think Discord is able to back down from more and more invasive moderation. We had big customers migrating from it, as having your customer platform where kids are groomed and dogs and cats are tortured every single day is not great for brands.
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