Things Discord gets right

Easy to open a space

Creating a new community on Discord is a couple clicks. Creating a new chatroom inside that community is a couple clicks.

It is then easy to invite people into the space, they don’t need to make a new account or otherwise sign up for your community and check their email and have a new password to forget.

Multimedia

It’s 2026 and people want to share pictures, screenshots, and large files. Images are part of the conversation. Not an add-on service.

Kinda private

Information in Discord is not private and encrypted or anything, but it’s not entirely public either. It’s closed-door but the door is unlocked. Invite links are shared in places where people in-the-community will see them. Friends can invite friends.

I think this closed-but-not-locked door model is a place people feel comfortable existing in online

Spectrum:

Information management

Let’s say there’s a community for Topic X. Discord can provide these services:

  1. Knowledgebase for Topic X. A collection of links to information on Topic X.
  2. Question-and-answer for people new to Topic X or troubleshooting their Topic X issues. Immediate feedback.
  3. Public conversation about Topic X.
  4. Backroom conversation about Topic X. Shop talk which might intimidate newcomers or things which need to stay relatively nonpublic. Niche topics that not many people are interested in.
  5. Chilling, shitposting, humanizing the other fans of Topic X and getting to know them more fully as people
  6. A private, related splinter group of people working independently on their own Topic X-related project

In Discord this can be

  1. A “resources” channel with 1hour slowmode, or “pins”, or such
  2. A tech support channel, maybe using the “forum” feature
  3. A #general channel
  4. A role-locked channel or maybe something that’s just hidden by default
  5. An #off-topic channel
  6. A new Discord guild

In Discord the “resources channel” / “tech support channel” patterns can be problematic because they are not accessible to the open internet.

I think in the web2.0 model this would be

  1. A wiki, which will only get edited by wiki geniuses instead of everyone.
  2. A forum, which isn’t as good as realtime support.
  3. A forum, which typically isn’t as good as realtime chat.
  4. A subforum.
  5. An irc, which doesn’t have the ability to upload images.
  6. Begging the mods to make you a private subforum, or hoping someone in the group has the experience to run their own forum (and irc and wiki), or something.

Eh?

“Embeds”

Just look at how popular fxbsky and fxtwitter are.

Message history, obviously

This is something I frankly do not really understand about IRC users. People use laptops and many people use phones. People go in-and-out of signal range and people roam across networks. People shut the lid of their laptop. People put the app in the background and then Android kills it. People cannot afford to stay connected 24/7 to a network just to follow the flow of conversation. This should be obvious.

Voice?

I don’t use voice chat so I don’t know. People seem to like it.

What can be done about it

We all fucking hate Discord these days and we know that the main reason they’re successful is because they got VCs to throw a bunch of money at them. How can a bunch of scraggly nerds recreate the things Discord gets right but without the Discord pricetag?

Easy to open a space

The program hosting the service needs a 1:n relationship with the communities on it. 1 server needs to be able to host multiple communities.

Hosting the software yourself needs to be easy and inexpensive. It needs to run on a wide variety of hosts with different amounts of resources.

Hosted options need to exist, maybe even with a free tier. Yes this kinda sucks. You just wanted to build software and now you have to run SaaS. If you want anything within three orders of magnitude of Discord’s size you will need to do this.

Kinda private

Multimedia

Image/video/file hosting is expensive yes. There are things that can be done.

Information management

If people have the ability to do interesting things with their online space, then people will do interesting things with their online space.

I think Roomy is working on some sort of thing which allows chats to organically grow into public-facing webpages, which solves the “ugh I have to join the discord to read the #resources channel” problem because it becomes easy to make that stuff public-facing. I think this is extremely interesting.

Embeds

Message history

Voice

Contraindications

Federation

Buzzword.

I don’t think full Mastodon-style federation is always the most appropriate thing. Single-sign-on gets you most of the way there (eliminates the “ughhh, i need to make another account to be here” barrier). Discord isn’t federated and noone cares.

E2EE

Unable to decrypt buzzword.

I hate to sound like a “I don’t need encryption because I have nothing to hide” guy, but many communities don’t need that level of encryption. Forums don’t have encrypted plaintext and people lived. Discord isn’t encrypted and people lived.

Key management/key rotation/etc are hardly solved problems and I think the tradeoffs they require for Everyday People are too much.

Bridging

Every channel with a bridge to another chat service devolves into discussion about the bridge itself. Hey can you stop pasting that into chat, it bridges terribly; hey we’re on IRC and don’t have multiline messages so please don’t use Enter in this channel sorry.