Discord has a clear segmentation where a "server" (community) has multiple "channels" (and "forums").
I can easily context-switch between servers. With Matrix there is no clear way (at least to me) to get all channels from a specific context - that is provided by someone else. I can of course manually organise channels somehow, but that's not what I want to do.
Example: When I join the Retro Handhelds community[0] on Discord I get access to a huge amount of channels, created by the server admins. I then have a fancy UI (Channels & Roles) where I can pick which specific retro handhelds I am interested in (RG35XX and Anbernic) and it hides the other channels from my view.
There are no other tools that can do this currently. Matrix has the technical capability, but their insistence on making the client NOT-Discord is getting a bit tedious.
I WANT to like Matrix, but they're making it so damn hard.
If anything, I would argue discord tends to improve website-based documentation because people ask the same question over and over again, leading to a need for a quick way to link the answer.
Who do you think is replacing FAQ's with Discord?
I don't know how much of an outlier this is, as said, I didn't ever use it again and that was at least two years ago. But at least here on hn I've read similar stories.
I have seen exactly 1 project ever have a solution to this, and ironically it was actually on Discord. Of all the many many chat applications out there, Discord seems to have the most flexible admin control of retroactive chat organisation, and 1 huge development community I'm in has actually proactively created threads when a reoccurring topic comes up again and then moved them to a common FAQ channel.
When enough people make the same thread to ask the same question, that is a frequently-asked question.
Nobody thinks that. Creating and maintaining a traditional website with a well-organized FAQ section requires non-zero effort. The discord backlog is already there on accident. This thread comes up every other month and is always full of people who seem to imagine a project lead sitting down to weigh pros and cons of possible options for their FAQ, and settling on, "I think we'll use Discord!"
Documentation lives on Discord for the same reason that so many companies have critical infrastructure running in Excel. Nobody sits down, evaluates tech stacks, and decides, "I think this part should run on Excel." It runs on Excel because the guy who initially wrote it was already interacting with a CSV file in Excel and didn't know how to do much else, or didn't want to spend the effort for something he thought might be a one-off job.
And the fundamental problem is that social chats are noisy, and you should never be using them for knowledge retention. And web forums aren't a replacement for social chat. And 99% of the questions and answers in there are from newbies and are covered in FAQs and are just noise anyway. You can't index your way out of a horrible noise problem.
They also do serve a purpose because as one of the subject-matter experts (who is a single-point-of-failure/final-escalation level), I don't have to get involved in most of the discussion. There's usually dozens of people on the server who can answer the easy questions, and I can monitor for people hitting real bugs that actually need fixing.
Here's the key: if I use something for free, I don't expect anything from it.
The other part is that Discord feels much more like a club than a library. It may be nicer, but no one is interested in popularizing information. Instead you have to hope to be heard by the experts. And that’s after the requirement of being a member. A forum is open to anyone on the internet, who can consult the interactions anytime they want. And information categorization is already done.
The real danger of Discord is that people want to use it for everything and forget to offer other means of communication like a Wiki or a bug tracker. Imagine if Arch Linux was only present on Discord.
The alternative are still the same as it was ages ago. Host a forum software yourself or pay someone to do it. And build a Wiki to answer the most requested information. Relying on free products from companies is not the correct decision if you care about permanence.
It’s not a “kids these days” grumble, just an honest observation that some computing skills are slowly being lost generationally, and it’s hard to say that anyone’s really to blame.
You might even be able to argue there's greater skills than ever before as compute is so cheap and FOSS is so readily available.
I was 1 of maybe 3 nerds in a school of 2500 people, 20 years ago. Being smart wasn't deemed to be cool, computers weren't cool—doing well in class made you a "swot".
The people who do productive things with tech for their own enjoyment and curiosity has always been small relative to people who just "consume" as an end user.
What is being lost is electronics design skills, despite KiCAD et al being available. Also not much interest in FPGAs and DSP from younger demographics, but at least MiSTer got some younger folks into FPGAs, but unfortunately, prices went through the roof to even get a foot on the ladder.
If folks want to convince less ideologically motivated people to switch and support The Cause it still needs so much TLC. It's barely competing on table stakes features for a chat platform.
This phrase was in context of sharing moderate amounts of data, but I think the un-indexable nature of Discord is a feature in more ways than that. The public internet has become decidedly less tolerant over the past decade and I can see why people would want to retreat from it and form more isolated communities.
I thought Parler back in 2021 was an interesting case study. From a simple game theory perspective, any group with minority opinions should probably not be organising in public. Majorities are pretty brutal to people who do not conform. We seem to be entering a tense era, so something like the Holocaust or the Chinese Land Reform Movement is not out of the question in the next 50 years. Pseudonymity is a good start, but even better is not having publicly available records of what was said so the bureaucrats don't know what to deanonymise.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites
The quite liberal free file attachment limits (25MB each), ease of communication and ironically the fact Discord is closed off in nature means it's quite attractive for people to more easily share things that would require a separate file host normally (it's an almost universal experience that forums usually have meager attachment caps).
I'd be quite interested in an article that understands Discord's benefits and use cases and then approaches a critique and alternative solutions to address it in a more open web friendly way.