I’m really curious where else everyone here hangs out on the internet besides Lemmy.
I myself am frequently on discord with my wife and friends playing games. I’ve also found myself in and around smaller blogs spaces like Kev Quirk and related people. Reddit used to be a place for me to hang out but I never found a community that I felt connected to. I don’t know if YouTube would be considered a place to hang out, but I frequently spend way more time there than I should. IRC used to be a great place for me.
So, where are your favorite places?
Discord shines when you use it with a tight-knit group. A RL friend group, a gaming clan, etc.
But there are a ton of these big public servers that are essentially just spam, because that’s what happens when you collect a load of random people in one place who have one minor interest in common at best, and then try and get them to hang out socially.
It’s a group chat app, not a forum. And being thrown into a group chat with 100 strangers is kind of the worst.
I have barely ever used Discord. What does it offer that you couldn’t find in, say, a Signal Group?
I’ve never used Signal, so can’t really answer that. But really assuming it’s the same sort of thing, which group messaging app you’re using isn’t as important as the people you’re using it with.
Personally I don’t do group chats on a lot of other apps due to them being quite all-or-nothing in terms of notifications. My favourite thing about Discord (been using it since back when it was in alpha) was the ability to separate out different channels and have actual granular control over what’s worth being notified about.
I don’t use voice / video chat much at all but it’s so handy to, for example, have it for the annual fantasy football draft in my league server even though we literally don’t touch it and just stick to 100% text chat the rest of the year.
If signal does all those things too, then they’re probably pretty similar.
OK, thanks!
Discord is built for gaming. Discord allows you to stream a game directly to a channel with one click. Discord allows for fine control over users in the server and what they are allowed to do. Signal doesn’t really have these features, and I’m guessing it’s becsuse the purpose is slightly different.
The closest privacy focused alternative to discord that I know of is Matrix. I’m thinking of moving my discord server where my friends and I play together over to Matrix. We will lose some features but gain some privacy.
I think there are discord clones that work very much like discord, but I’m not aware of their privacy focus. Revolt comes to mind : https://revolt.chat
Thank you for the detailed answer!
I do appreciate that nuance but IRC (as of last I checked - admittedly it’s been about a decade since I was habitually connected to IRC) is not really like that despite fitting essentially the same description.
That makes sense, I can see that.
Yeah I expect given how long ago IRC’s heydey was, we’re talking about quite a different demographic. Everyone I know who used it was on the nerdy side (this includes me, it’s not an insult!), whereas things like Discord with their modern interfaces make things easy enough that for example I run a crafting community on there full of old ladies sharing their cross stitch.
Anything that attracts huge numbers of regular folks like that is gonna be a target for trolls and spammers and suchlike, so without good moderation a public server can spiral down quite fast in my experience. Add to all this the ever-increasing hostility and us-vs-them of people on the internet in general, and ugh.
I’m sure there are plenty of lovely spaces out there too ofc, it’s just finding them that’s the trick :)
Thanks for the followup - I have to agree and I suppose the takeaway is I (possibly) picked the wrong servers so far.