IRC is a completely open source protocol that anyone can develop clients and servers for, it’s been around for decades and has an army of dedicated fans and devs.
Discord is a program owned by a private company that everyone is using to chat while the company slowly implements pricing and walls their proverbial garden off.
I don’t have proof of why discord is getting shoved down our throats everywhere but I think it is probably in large part because there is a fuckton of investor money behind trying to make discord swallow up every online community it can and they have kept costs to customers/shitty behavior dialed back until they establish an unassailable dominance over the market. Everyone just thinks it is great and it doesn’t cost much money so what could possibly go wrong??
With your one Discord account you join all the servers you care about and interact with online/IRL friends.
There are downsides that people at Lemmy will find dealbreaking and I absolutely agree with them, but the convenience of it being a chat, forum (almost), voice/video calling and gaming platform for free with (currently) no ads triumphs all of that for the majority of people, and that’s what makes it popular. It’s also cross-platform so no one’s left out.
Discord has a really low barrier to entry for conversation, it’s low friction. If someone playing a game gets a sorta funny screenshot they can share it in Discord and have a decent chance to get some responses or reactions.
But they won’t post it on Reddit or anything because there’s more friction there, it feels like more work to create a post and then you’re unlikely to get any responses anyways, and even if you get upvotes you can’t see who upvoted like if it’s someone you know, and there’s no easy emoji reactions. And users making comments to respond also feels higher friction than a message, people are just less likely to do it for whatever reason.
It just feels like small scale conversations are more likely to happen in Discord than anywhere else. If you have a small group of people then something like Reddit/Lemmy probably won’t be sustainable, it’ll never take off, but get them in Discord and you’re more likely to keep the group active.
Small communities were somewhat sustainable on Reddit, but they’re completely infeasible on Lemmy unless you already have authority over a community. Like, Star Trek is a great success story for Lemmy because the r/risa mods told everyone exactly where to go and used that authority that already exists. But r/warframe did the same thing and dormi.zone has very little activity. People don’t want to make a Lemmy account on a gamble, they want to go where they have an account or they know there’s community. Lemmy has a bootstrap problem. You can overcome the bootstrap problem with something like a community for memes or cats, but good luck building a community for some obscure game or interest here.
When I’m talking about a small community, I’m talking about like my own Discord with only ~200 members, but the communities you’re talking about are WAY bigger
You mentioned r/Warframe, that has 660,481 followers
These are all much much bigger than what I meant by small communities, and I don’t think my Discord community would be active on Reddit either.
But yes you are correct, another similar success story is lemdro.id and they did the same thing where the mods of r/Android pushed people to that Lemmy instance and they still have a link in the sidebar
Can someone please explain to me why discord is being used for everything? Isn’t it basically IRC?
It’s a great tool to set up with a small group of friends to stay in contact. It’s being pigeonholed for everything else
Its fancy IRC with voice channel support, etc
IRC is a completely open source protocol that anyone can develop clients and servers for, it’s been around for decades and has an army of dedicated fans and devs.
Discord is a program owned by a private company that everyone is using to chat while the company slowly implements pricing and walls their proverbial garden off.
I don’t have proof of why discord is getting shoved down our throats everywhere but I think it is probably in large part because there is a fuckton of investor money behind trying to make discord swallow up every online community it can and they have kept costs to customers/shitty behavior dialed back until they establish an unassailable dominance over the market. Everyone just thinks it is great and it doesn’t cost much money so what could possibly go wrong??
Ease of use.
With your one Discord account you join all the servers you care about and interact with online/IRL friends.
There are downsides that people at Lemmy will find dealbreaking and I absolutely agree with them, but the convenience of it being a chat, forum (almost), voice/video calling and gaming platform for free with (currently) no ads triumphs all of that for the majority of people, and that’s what makes it popular. It’s also cross-platform so no one’s left out.
Discord has a really low barrier to entry for conversation, it’s low friction. If someone playing a game gets a sorta funny screenshot they can share it in Discord and have a decent chance to get some responses or reactions.
But they won’t post it on Reddit or anything because there’s more friction there, it feels like more work to create a post and then you’re unlikely to get any responses anyways, and even if you get upvotes you can’t see who upvoted like if it’s someone you know, and there’s no easy emoji reactions. And users making comments to respond also feels higher friction than a message, people are just less likely to do it for whatever reason.
It just feels like small scale conversations are more likely to happen in Discord than anywhere else. If you have a small group of people then something like Reddit/Lemmy probably won’t be sustainable, it’ll never take off, but get them in Discord and you’re more likely to keep the group active.
Small communities were somewhat sustainable on Reddit, but they’re completely infeasible on Lemmy unless you already have authority over a community. Like, Star Trek is a great success story for Lemmy because the r/risa mods told everyone exactly where to go and used that authority that already exists. But r/warframe did the same thing and dormi.zone has very little activity. People don’t want to make a Lemmy account on a gamble, they want to go where they have an account or they know there’s community. Lemmy has a bootstrap problem. You can overcome the bootstrap problem with something like a community for memes or cats, but good luck building a community for some obscure game or interest here.
When I’m talking about a small community, I’m talking about like my own Discord with only ~200 members, but the communities you’re talking about are WAY bigger
You mentioned r/Warframe, that has 660,481 followers
r/risa has 28,568 followers
startrek.website has 3k users
[email protected] has 6.53k subscribers
These are all much much bigger than what I meant by small communities, and I don’t think my Discord community would be active on Reddit either.
But yes you are correct, another similar success story is lemdro.id and they did the same thing where the mods of r/Android pushed people to that Lemmy instance and they still have a link in the sidebar