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Stop Using Discord for Your Open source Communities | mattcen's mumblings
(blog.mattcen.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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Putting a community on Discord also means locking it (and all the information you create over time) behind Discord's license terms, policies, and whims.
I care about my users. I wouldn't ask them to agree to those terms, let alone allow Discord to be gatekeeper of my communities.
Worse yet. Install a whitelist firewall or have a look at the connections required to access Discord. You will immediately stop using it. It involves dozens of undocumented raw IP address connections and weird ports. Top this off by telling me what their business model is and how they are profitable. They provide no documentation whatsoever about what they are doing and why. The best explanation anyone has ever given me when asked why they use discord is, 'because everyone else is doing it.' That is idiotic nonsense.
The issue is a social platform is useless without the social aspect. If someone's entire friend group is on one site, they're unlikely to move to another. Trying to get the whole friend group to move is also easier said than done due to inertia and t eother members of the friend group also being in communities and friend groups that aren't on the new platform. Now imagine that on the scale of a site like Discord and combine it with FOSS alternatives often have fewer features, less software support (for bots, clients, etc), and higher barriers to entry and you have a recipe for disaster for many new social media platforms. ~Strawberry