Comment by LexiMax
17 hours ago
> the former type is all but obliterated now.
Discord is the 9,000lb gorilla of this form of social media, and it's actually quietly one of the largest social platforms on the internet. There's clearly a desire for these kinds of spaces, and Discord seems to be filling it.
While it stinks that it is controlled by one big company, it's quite nice that its communities are invite-only by default and largely moderated by actual flesh-and-blood users. There's no single public shared social space, which means there's no one shared social feed to get hooked on.
Pretty much all of my former IRC/Forum buddies have migrated to Discord, and when the site goes south (not if, it's going to go public eventually, we all know how this story plays out), we expect that we'll be using an alternative that is shaped very much like it, such as Matrix.
> Discord is the 9,000lb gorilla of this form of social media, and it's actually quietly one of the largest social platforms on the internet. There's clearly a desire for these kinds of spaces, and Discord seems to be filling it.
The "former type" had to do with online socializing with people you know IRL.
I have never seen anything on Discord that matches this description.
I'm in multiple Discord servers with people I know IRL.
In fact, I'd say it's probably the easiest way to bootstrap a community around a friend-group.
Is this a generational thing? All my groups of this type are on WhatsApp (unfortunately).
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The split where social networking is mostly for people you “know” and social media is… some other thing, mostly for scrolling videos, definitely is significant.
But, the “know IRL” split is a bit artificial I think. For example my discord is full of people I knew in college: I knew them IRL for four years, and then we all moved around and now we’ve known each other online for decades. Or childhood friends. By now, my childhood friend and college friend circles are partially merged on discord, and they absolutely know each other (unfortunately there’s no way for you to evaluate this but I know them all quite well and it would be absurd to me, to consider them anything other than friends).
The internet is part of the real world now. People socialize on it. I can definitely see a distinction between actually knowing somebody, and just being in a discord channel with them. But it is a fuzzy social thing I think, hard to nail down exactly where the transition is (also worth noting that we have acquaintances that we don’t really “know” offline, the cashier at our favorite shops for example).
You're essentially saying you haven't seen anyone's private chats.
I'm in a friend Discord server. It's naturally invisible unless someone sends you an invite.
I'm sorry but what?! 'Socializing with people you know IRL' is almost exclusively what I've seen Discord used for, and almost solely what I personally use it for. There are vastly more Discord servers set up among IRL friend groups (or among classmates, as another popular use case) than there are Discord servers for fandoms of people who have never met IRL.
Yeah same as sibling comments, I'm in multiple discord servers for IRL friend groups. I personally run one with ~50 people that sees a hundreds of messages a day. By far my most used form of social media. Also as OP said, I'll be migrating to Matrix (probably) when they IPO, we've already started an archival project just in case.
While it's also used to socialize with people you don't know IRL, most of my experience with Discord (mostly in uni) was to aggregate people IRL together. We had discords for clubs, classes, groups of friends, etc. The only reason I use discord now is for the same reason. Private space for a group of people to interact asynchronously in a way that's more structured than a text group chat.
And you won't. I will NOT invite anyone from "social media" to any of the 3 very-private, yet outrageously active, servers, and that's why they have less than 40 users collectively. They're basically for playing games and re-streaming movies among people on first name basis or close to it. And I know those 40 people have others of their own, and I know I'll never ever have access to them either. Because I dont know those other people in them.
And I know server like these are in the top tier of engagement for discord on the whole because they keep being picked for AB testing new features. Like, we had activities some half a year early. We actually had the voice modifiers on two of them, and most people don't even know that was a thing.
Idk most of the people I "met" on the internet happened originally on IRC. I didn't know them till a decade or more later.
I'd say WhatsApp is a better example
WhatsApp really feels to me more like group chat. Not really breaking barrier of social media. But then again I am not in any mass chats.
Discord is many things. Private chat groups, medium communities and then larger communities with tens of thousands of users.
> WhatsApp really feels to me more like group chat.
So what's wrong with that?
900 lb. Gorillas don't weigh 9000 lbs