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 don’t think it’s necessarily about ease of use, it’s more about ease of setting a thing up, and getting people to adopt the new place.
For discord, there’s one platform and anyone can start a ‘server’ and then create ‘channels’ and issue invitations. And as far as I know, it’s free.
It’s true that Discourse now has a much easier to operate setup for custom domains… 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 won’t.
Another question might be, where will Discord communities go… 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 it’s mostly forgettable duplicated ephemeral chat spam
Why anyone uses it as a core customer or community support platform I don’t 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, I’d be willing to toss my hat in the ring.
This just posted on Hacker News
Higher is 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 didn’t order that by score descending. Was the order just arbitrary? 
Have access but have no time to watch it - that’s why chat is inferior to forums. Probably great for some applications like “during the event/game/livestream” chat … but otherwise … chat in general is just an ephemeral disorganised mess.
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Thanks for that. I think it’s essential reading, really, because it’s an outsiders view of what Discourse offers and what value that delivers. It’s 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 don’t use it much? (It’s 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. It’s vitally important, yet insufficient to a community’s 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: