Recently I accidentally made a Fediverse post which went viral:
stop using discord for your open source communities
That post is short, punchy, opinionated, and prescriptive, which I suspect is the cause for its virality.
Unfortunately, like many micro-blog posts, it lacks nuance, which many replies highlighted. I made the post to vent my frustration at needing to join a Discord server to interact with a community, so it is far from a measured critique of the subject.
This blog post is an attempt to address those nuances in greater detail. This is not an exhaustive analysis, and I’ve resolved to not let “perfect” be the enemy of “done”.
Users are capable of going to discord. The vast majority of your users already have a discord account too! Awesome!
Forums are a pain in the ass to moderate and maintain. If you need a knowledgebase, wikis exist.
If I may ask, what makes Discord less of a pain to moderate? And forums also tend to be good for users to ask more obscure questions that aren’t likely to be easily answered on a wiki and for other users to be able to look them up later. ~Strawberry
Discord has forums and enabling slowmode means that you can enforce longform content in them. The search in discord is better than any search in phpbb by miles, this isn’t even an argument.
Discord moderation is easy. See something, right click, perform action. Automod. Bots. The entirety of the “Safety Setup” section on discord servers. Verification levels. I mean, it’s not even remotely close. People arguing that forums are better are either delusional or have never really owned a remotely active discord server.
However, content in Discord servers can’t be indexed by search engines. ~Strawberry