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I love “old school forums” as much as anyone else drawn to the fediverse, but there is no denying that discord in particular has a very specific flow and community structure that does not exist on forums. Just like you can’t get the full forum experience on discord. It’s not about emojis, it’s that all these services have their own sauce when it comes to how the users interact. Clearly “traditional” forums are not great for everything, otherwise we would not be on the fediverse!

It’s impossible to have a real time conversation, for starters. Also I have one server in particular where we use voice a ton. The ability to see Miss Lee jump from something that is not quite a forum, not quite instant messaging, but also has a voice/video features, is incredibly convenient.

The problem with Discord is the company for the most part. If you took 80% of the current features and package them the same as idk five years ago? It would be unbelievable. I’ve seen some projects like guilded and revolt attempting to make an open source alternative, and they actually don’t run poorly at all, but it’s the classic problem of trying to get everybody over to it when the big client is fine for 99% of people on it.