I'm sure a lot of us didn't use it much because it was overwhelming and difficult to follow sometimes, but I know that lots of people loved it, and I'm one of them.
Just feeling reflective and thinking about what lessons can be learned from the whole experience, what we can use going forwards for the betterment of our community, and what we think are things we want to build towards.
I'm so utterly proud of this community, many wonderful things happened on the discord and in the weeks after the sub was banned, so many people came together and worked hard for the betterment of their comrades, we've witnessed a glimpse of the power of our solidarity with one another, and I can't wait to see how far we can go.
I love you all, and you know I mean it <3
It moved too fast for me personally. I stuck to lurking a handful of channels (opsec, veganism, debate-veganism, and everything in the server deets section) because otherwise I couldn't keep up fully with conversations that were taking place. I barely posted at all on reddit too so it's not much different for me I guess.
I think things like discord/matrix are better used for asking/answering simple questions like 'Does anybody have any movie recommendations in x genre?' and less good for longer/more complex discussions that require full paragraphs of text to get ideas across. I liked the megathreads on the sub because you could see a ton of different conversations happening in the same space which just isn't possible to do in a discord chat channel.
It was better than nothing though. I hadn't realized how much of my time on reddit was spent on cth and how shitty the rest of reddit was until I was kind of forced to go without.
I agree with you, better than nothing but not the best for proper discussion.
It was also really hard to follow multiple different conversational threads across more than a few a hours, so most of the time you'd start a discussion and it'd go nowhere.
I generally didn't even try to follow conversations as they happened. Just check in on a channel whenever I got bored and scroll through the 200+ messages til I caught up, but yeah it sounds impossible to stay on top of more than one conversation.
I'm just happy we're here now.
Random thoughts:
Never entering a megathread is the only way to use Discord. Extremely online cliques are poison and should have been scattered to the winds at inception rather than being given the megaphone for endless votes of no-confidence. #mod-feedback was a masterclass in tantrum politics and demonstrated the weakness of "the online vanguard" to shitty people who will not shut the fuck up. There were some good memes, I guess, but the format lends itself to cliquishness and personality cults. Whinging about "transparency" but not proposing or helping to create tools to make such transparency easier to realize is wrecker shit. Approximately 1% of users fundamentally do not understand that "discomfort" does not immediately make "conflict" nor make a place "unsafe". 90% of drama could have been defused with a 30 minute mute and a temporary struggle sesh channel to be nuked upon resolution. Abusing unpaid volunteer mods is fucked up. Sectarian distrust and assumptions of bad faith no matter how transparently innocuous the interaction was very offputting. People taking themselves seriously on gray gamer site should be derided; internet is not real.
chat rooms, especially busy ones, are just not my cup of tea
it feels like you are expected to speak up in an active conversation, some people flourish in that environment, for some people it's a barrier
the threaded forum style of reddit is much more my cup of tea, but a barrier for some people for different reasons
I feel like you need both available to meet everyone's need
yeah i definetly agree with this, i am sure all the people are tired from launching this fast but at some point maybe we can get a live chat like reddit here for discord lovers too.
matrix integration is definitely on the cards although it’s not a top priority at the moment.
Fucking great - Unite the tribes - the chat format isn't for me and fuck discord's corporate policies but matrix integration would be cool for whoever wants chat.
Have chapo.chat like a twitch page with the chat box on the right, except instead of video just the chapo forums on the left. Best of both worlds on one page.
It's so hard to follow along a Discord. I hate it. The news and electoralism bit was nice though
I just can't fucking do it, even if i sat down for like 30 mins and started chatting, I just can't keep up. Coming back online and being completely out a a conversation that feels like it's been going for an hour and you don't want to butt in was also a hard feeling to get over.
ikd adhd gang couldn't deal other than opening discord on my phone on the shitter and posting "cum" in the fast megathread 3 times daily
Same here. I found a local discord I like because some channels have just a handful of people posting and all that's I can keep up with
They just have completely different use cases tbh. Discord is basically a modern version of IRC, whereas sites like Reddit and chapo.chat are like old forums and messageboards. Trying to make one into the other simply won't work.
This was what I used it for tbh. I hope the news community gets bigger here
God I love the discord. It was overwhelming, a ceaseless attention-grab, and I truly love it. I found a part of myself there; it turned me, for the first time in my 10+ years as an internet lurker, into a poster. And now... here I am .
I'm really loving chapo.chat though, already. The slower pace allows for a lot more depth and nuance. But also, I feel that the autorefresh system makes for more back-and-forth engagements in threads, which is really nice too.
What I'm getting at is that I love this community, and all the ways we've found to come together :heart-sickle:
HELL YEAH! That's fucking awesome comrade!
It really does feel like we're home now, whatever that actually means :)
Same here, I think I posted maybe one or two comments back in the subreddit, but Discord turned me a bit too. Certainly helps that the emotes make shitposting way easier and more fun, glad those have been brought over
:og-hex-bear: :john-brown: :heart-sickle: :stalin-shining: :AyyyyyOC: :PIGPOOPBALLS:
Yeah. Pretty much same for me, too. I'm not much of a poster, but I had a lot of fun silly/shitposting in the 10s thread.
discord is dogshit
fine with an extended circle of friends but totally overwhelming with several thousand strangers
I appreciate the effort though. As far as community lifeboats go, I guess we coulda done worse.
Why would I work all day on my quality hardcore leftists memes if only 13 people are going to see it for 9 seconds while it flies by.
It's super cliquey with each channel having like 4 or 5 main people that control the conversation. Very happy to be on here now!
Discord communities are inherently limited.
Having run a large one for several years there is one key problem with discord that there isn't a resolution for -- it has an activity ceiling per channel and people are sticky to channels so don't move around much.
Any given channel can only take around 10-15 maximum currently participating people before it becomes utterly unuseable due to chat moving too quickly. This means that people simply stop participating when it reaches this ceiling. In addition to this, people don't really like to move channels much.
What this leads to is channels having core-community groups of extremely high activity people and a lot of other people feeling rather alienated around the periphery of the community. In addition to this those that simply participate more end up with more "clout" in these in-groups that form, this can cause all kinds of clique-ey problems for community direction.
You can mitigate this by simply accepting it and building dozens of very separate isolated community groups and still maintain growth, but you can never form a cohesive whole.
That problem does not exist in reddit style boards, which is why they're far superior for large communities and feel more cohesive.
Like the French peasantry described by Marx as a sack of potatoes rather than an organized whole.
Discord is a fucking terrible format, especially for large communities, and that goddamn place was full to the brim with dumb fucking drama and bullshit. If it were up to me the server hosting the chapo discord's information would be fucking nuked, and the world would be a better place for it.
Mods did a great job managing the discord, however no amount of good moderation will ever keep discord from sucking sloppy ass
I personally hate discord because it moves too fast and it always feels like you're interrupting.
Which is why I only felt comfortable in the extremely slow channels like the covid one, or in the ones that happen so fast that it was basically pissing in the wind. Emotes are fun though.
Discord's a shitty platform, y'all should have taken me up on my offer to go on Matrix.
For what you did on discord, though, you guys did the best you could with managing the list of rooms and trying to moderate, but a 10,000 member chatroom is never really going to be easy for either mods or posters to handle. I barely interacted there.
Very insightful info, thank you. I feel extremely stupid that i gave money to the fucking tracr.co thing (had no idea they were fascists but now that I think about it for more than 2 seconds it seems fucking obvious) because I wanted to see what info they had on my accounts and wanted to remove it, I was pissed when the deletion link did nothing. Is there an existing good alternative on Matrix that also does voice calls, screen sharing, etc..?
What did happen when you gave them money?
Matrix is designed for text chat. It does have the ability to embed widgets in the room which can allow for voice/video meetings, but last time I tried this it was really annoying and didn't work well. So just go on meet.jit.si to create an ephemeral meeting room and post the link to the room in some chatroom on matrix.
If you want voice chat without then mumble is literally the best software ever for that. It puts discord to shame. The concepts are the same, the UI is just as good, the voice activity detection is incredible, and the sound quality is perfectly fine. Literally the only downside is that it doesn't have text chat (well, it does, but it's so limited that it doesn't count) so you have to use a different desktop app for text chat and voice chat instead of them being combined. I'm fine with that, though.
Unlike jitsi, mumble servers don't go away when everyone leaves, so you can drop in and out of them any time without needing to share a link.
Paid via paypal, gave me access to the "full user page" so I could see more connected accounts, server, etc.. I made another account after that since my current discord account had some stuff on it.
I tried jitsi, it's really neat. Wonder how they host this and make money. I have pretty particular needs (online dnd), I use the voice/video chats of discord a lot and the Go Live feature has sound on top of the screen-sharing (although it doesn't really work half the time). I want a voice chat with good sound quality, video conference for webcams, and a good screenshare either with sound, or the ability to stream sound/music through another voice channel with a good sound quality (like mp3 quality, below that the compression/quality isn't good enough for me).
On jitsi for example I can do almost all of the above, but the sound quality isn't good enough to stream music and screenshare has no sound (also has no noise-cancellation). That was the advantage of bots on discord. I've thought about mumble/other voice clients, but I also need a good chat. Any fragmentation of software is an exponential chance of technical problems and the annoyance of my tech-clumsy friends.
I'll keep looking at the best compromise, thanks for the info!
Fragmentation is pretty annoying, but here's a setup idea:
- Video and screenshare on jitsi
- Voice on mumble (you can keep the window in the background once you connect)
- Text chat on matrix (arrange the matrix and jitsi windows in a way that lets you see both, or try using the matrix jitsi widget)
- Stream music through https://cytu.be or something. It's synchronised youtube playback so it should sound significantly nicer than streaming audio through a voice call. You can send this window to the background.
But yeah I agree that this is annoying and requires setup and honestly using discord for this is easier. I'd probably try to make this work, but I'm just some tech chick.
Jitsi would fill almost the entire thing, with the exception of better voice/noise cancel, but mumble would be nice too. I don't need the text chat too much. What I currently use for music is that I have a basic icecast/shoutcast server on a VPS, I stream music from my machine to that server (butt client), and I have a simple radio HTML player (using amplitude.js to adapt it for live-streaming) on a webpage that my players listen to. It's great quality (basically same as listening to it myself on my own machine), but comes with some latency. The reason I do this is that, to make even more annoying, I don't stream music or use youtube much. I like to have my own music files, I also often have music that I edited, cut or processed a bit (like a nice cover of a video game track that I downloaded and applied some noise-reduction on, etc..). So yea on top of everything else I have to stream music from local files.
I'm a tech-person as well, but even just having to load a seperate web page for my HTML radio is something that I need to remind my players of, introduces potential technical issues, and I also need to load up a whole audio config on my machine every time. It's working pretty well so far tho, just wish I could get rid of the latency, or at least guaranty that all players and myself have the same latency and not have one player 2 minutes behind. Pause/Play on the players fixes that problem, but that kinda ruins the mood to have to make sure my players are hearing what i'm hearing.
You should see if you can embed the player in a matrix room as a widget. The instructions here might help you. https://github.com/Johni0702/mumble-web#matrix-widget Use
m.custominstead ofjitsi. (Note: These instructions do not actually currently work for mumble because the microphone permission box never appears. You might be able to get it to work with your player website.)
The impression I got from the discord was that it was pretty harshly judgmental and cool kids only. Maybe I just didn't get a complete picture
Same feeling, I felt like there was no way for new people to participate without getting jumped on for conversational faux pas, not immediately adhering to unspoken cliquish behavior or just outright getting ignored. So much better to have our own sub back.
Alright cool. I thought be about to get ripped up (there's still time). Wondering in retrospect if the discord skewed really young? It was kind of like going to a busy hipster bar. This is definitely more my speed. How awkward was it to post and just see that in the meantime everyone was like, who's the freak that's been typing forever?
