People and groups do not have "Discord servers" any more then people have "Facebook servers". They've just coopted the jargon from actual voice chat servers like mumble, teamspeak, etc which you do run on servers and control what happens.

Using a centralized service like Discord where you are the product, where the protocol is intentionally and legally enfoced as proprietary, is a real bad idea.

Do you think that IRC uses actual radio channels as well?

What's the relevance of radio channels and Discord here?

You might want to re-read both the comment of my parent, and my comment again.

Parent complains that Discord 'servers' are misnamed because they are not literally individual servers. I asked them if they have a similar gripe with IRC, because IRC 'channels' are named that after radio/tv channels, but they are not literally radio channels.

Ah alright, thanks for the clarification. I also believe the term server is misleading, maybe the word group would be better suited?

That seems unnecessarily pedantic. Someone who cares whether the servers are open or not knows perfectly well that a Discord server is not a server per se.

Could you elaborate on why a custom client is the different between using their service and choosing not to at all?

I think the main reason is just performance. The official client is slow and slows down my computer. I have signed up and joined a few servers like Mario maker ones and the one for the diablo disassembly project (which I always forget the name). Currently, once in a blue moon I open it in search for mario maker IDs. However, I never spend any time there, as the chatting experience is not very good.

It's not very good because:

- notifications work badly for me (notifying a lot more than I'd like, I briefly tried to get it to only notify me when someone called me specifically, but I can't couldn't find a way that wouldn't involve going through all the channels

- it's slow and uses too much memory for my puny little pc

- it's hard to keep track of the last read message and current latest message. It requires clicks and it's clunky to use.

- this is a personal one, I find the interface really ugly and I value beauty in my UIs

If there was a server I was incredibly excited about I could put up with it. But given my mild interest, I end up never logging in. If there was a terminal UI that I could leave running in the background, not taking too many resources, I'd definitely leave it on a tab and interact on topics I found interesting, just like I do currently with IRC.

Have you tried running it in a browser? Most features work, and Firefox/Chrome have much better notification systems and performance.

When I run it nowadays is usually on Chrome. I'm just glad the people and projects I really care about are not on discord.

Because the discord desktop program is kind of crap? Why can't I collapse the godamn channel list? edit: because I was misunderstood, I mean collapsing the column so that chat takes up the entire window space. I've only been able to do this through developer mode edits.

It's all so bad. Wasted UI space. Takes up my entire screen. Sys req is way out of proportion for a chat client. Weird UI prompts.

>Why can't I collapse the godamn channel list?

You can collapse the channel list if the channels are grouped together.

They also recently added server folders so you can collapse the server list.

>Wasted UI space. Takes up my entire screen.

You don't have to use it in full screen... just resize the window...

Resizing the window does not change anything, it makes things worse as the messages now will not be displayed properly. Try it. Resize the window, you will notice the parts whose size does not change at all.

Why is that in a 80x24 terminal I have everything on screen while typical Electron applications require one workspace per application otherwise the crucial data becomes ugly? Just let us resize bits or make them collapsible or something.

The Electron disease.