Looking for advice - does it make sense to switch from Discord to Discourse?

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Hello! I’m a lead admin for an online community that is currently on Discord. We run a Minecraft server based on a children’s book series and use Discord as a community hub, including announcements, staff communication, and general discussion.

The Discord guild has about 2000 members, but I would guess there are less than a hundred active players. The community has been around since 2016 but only really grew to size a year after after moving to Discord in 2019.

We’ve recently been discussing moving away from Discord and onto another platform. Discourse is currently looking like the best option. We have the resources and skills needed to migrate, but we are currently torn on whether this is a good idea for our community.

The idea of moving came about because of concerns about relying on Discord as a corporation. Many of our users create a Discord account specifically to join our community, and it concerns me that we are potentially opening up a lot of danger with Discord’s poor reputation of banning dangerous servers, especially for younger users. The advertising and micro-transactions are also increasingly irritating and get in the way of community.

However, we also are concerned that a move to a dedicated forum site would not be taken well. We have a subset of users who stay around only for the Discord and I think they would literally outrage if we announced such a thing. And for new members, Discord is a recognizable platform as opposed to a random forum, and we’re afraid that our audience of 13-18 yr-olds are not going to even try such a thing.

Is moving to Discourse unrealistic? Do people care about Discord’s shift to revenue streams? Has anyone found success in migrating a community from Discord? Or cultivating a younger community on Discourse? Is it worth pursuing a better platform if most people are familiar with and indifferent towards Discord?

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I’ve worked with a couple communities that moved from Discord to Discourse, but both with a much older audience and likely a bad fit for Discord in the first place. Getting a teenage audience onto a web-based community sounds like quite a challenge.

Beyond the concerns you mentioned, do you have direct improvements for your members that you could offer on a forum, but not on Discord? You could also reach out more directly to your members to get a feel for that.

An inspiring example for a web-based gaming community is https://metafy.gg. They have a range of unique value propositions. But their platform is custom built and as one can see, with a ton of resources invested.

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Have you considered discussing it directly with your community? Getting early buy-in is key to any platform change. Have you seen this resource?

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Perhaps this may help?

Migrating over, if you have a large userbase fixated on Discord, the migration may be harder, but no impossible in any way.

A thing that you can try is to try getting a few of the most active users onto the forum and get it ‘up and going’. Users may move more towards the place where there is increased activity.

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