Just to note that the use of the word “servers” in the
Discord world has nothing to do with server hardware—“server” refers to an organized group of users—a clique, as it were.
Yeah, that's a really annoying terminology thing they do. A "server" is like this forum. The rest makes sense though: "channels" that are like topics here, etc.
Discord is user-unfriendly and is mostly geared to the needs of gamers and other file-sharers, not casual users who just want to interactively converse.
My experience has been exactly the opposite. I find Discord to be one of the best text chat systems out there (and I've used a
lot of them, from irc and icb in the '90s onward). It's fairly straightforward to use at a basic level, and properly supports formatting using the easiest standard (Markdown, though less technical users who do not understand the concept of markup may have difficulty with this), has both replies and threads that work reasonably well, and so on. It's definitely a step ahead of Slack, and as far as organisation goes, far ahead of things like IRC or Telegram.
That said, we will all have or own opinions on what kind of UI we like.
An annoying “feature” of Discord is it supports bots, ostensibly to automate maintenance tasks. More commonly, bots are spam sources, which like E-mail spam, eat up bandwidth and users’ time.
Isn't it fortunate that you're not forced to add bots to your channels! I'm sure you just forgot to mention this, and were not trying to spread FUD.
Using Discord to chat can be like having to assemble your own telephone from parts and then figure out how to connect it to the POTS network....
XMPP is less hassle, requiring little technical knowledge on the part of a casual user who merely wants to register for an account on a Jabber (i.e., XMPP) server and start chatting.
My experience with naïve users has been the exact opposite. With Discord you simply give someone a URL to go to in their browser, and they're guided through the client download and joining the "server." To use XMPP you need to figure out on your own which client to use, how to find and register with the server, etc., which is much closer to your "assemble telephone and connect to the POTS network" example.
But I could well be missing something here. Fortunately it's easy enough to compare: just set up an XMPP system for chat and point us at how to start using it, and we'll all be able to compare the two directly.
This last item bothers me—I would not want my online conversations being logged by an unknown and untrusted third-party entity, which is exactly what Discord has been doing.
Yes, just as happens with this very forum. It's a good point that you shouldn't post anything in Discord that you don't want available to the general public, just as you do here.
BTW, I’m not into chat rooms. :D
Fair enough. Those who prefer this forum should just continue to use it, and ignore Wayfarer's (and other) Discord servers.
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