this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
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As a genuine fan of video games as art and multiplayer video games as digital communities, seeing everything go to Discord, even open source projects, has been really sad to watch happen over and over again.
Honestly... Lemmy would be a FAR better platform to run a video game community on than Discord.
Fuck Discord.
Like... the format of Discord is fine (except if you are going to use it to manage a software project, it needs to be designed to facilitate technical support, questions about bugs, and facilitate creating an easily searchable wiki of info along with the live chat), I am fine with the idea but Discord has used its massive popularity and capital to completely eat entire swatchs of video gaming niches and not only is that scary, Discord SUCKS as a tool for handling complex communities with lots of moving parts.
Before someone defends Discord by saying "it works great for small groups of friends" let me pre-emptively answer -> true, yes it does work great for small groups of friends, that is what it was designed for originally probably right? Ok... but small groups of friends is literally the easiest possible usecase for a communication tool, if Discord was bad at that it wouldn't be good at anything.
Lemmy does not have voice chat.
If only discord had stuck to just voice chat. They are miles better in that arena than other options were at the time. I just hate how it also replaced forums. And issue trackers. And some people try to run wikis and image boorus and everything else under the sun as a discord server
This is an issue I see with Lemmy regarding Discord. Many people here seem to think of Discord as a messaging platform only. Which is weird because I don’t know anyone who uses it strictly for text. For example my friend group is probably 60% voice, 30% video/screen sharing & 10% text.
I mean it depends on the community but definitely for gaming it's used quite often as a cross-platform voice chat solution.
Just use Jitsi for anything other than perzistent chat.
people choose bluesky over mastodon because it was too hard for them to choose an instance… this is not a solution
Jitsi has a central instance
yes, but the comment was meant to illustrate that people don’t often do even minor extra steps like choosing an instance
it’s common knowledge in the software industry that adding questions to registration forms beyond username and password has a dramatic impact on sign-up - tiny things too that you wouldn’t think is a problem people drop off and just don’t do it
the same is true for “just use jitsi” and that’s a huge barrier: the community admin first has to know it exists, then has to make decisions about using it (or which other option? there are a few - better decide and that’s work)… how will your community handle real time messaging? more things to work out, more options to think about… and even when the admin has made all those decisions, now the community has to know that they exist (likely a bunch of reading, or perhaps more likely - they just don’t read and don’t know and the service isn’t widely used, and then that leads to fragmentation of your community)
discord is a single solution to a lot of problems. FOSS just straight up is not there, and lemmy is a VERY poor substitute - it’s a completely different communication format, with almost none of the core functions that discord provides. different core functions sure, but they aren’t really comparable
the FOSS community often downplays the energy required to make choices - often having no choice, to end users, is better than having to make a choice - even if the end result is worse
How do you suppose you have a live conversation on lemmy? And don't say make a post, and then talk in the post. Lemmy is not set up for the type of communities we want, otherwise people would already be using it for that.
Discord was recently integrated with PS5 and XBOX. Its not going away anytime soon.