640
Discord Alternatives, Ranked
(taggart-tech.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
640 points (96.1% liked)
Technology
81026 readers
4194 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
We need to bring back the forum platforms. That is how communities looked and it was great
I just set up mybb board a few weeks ago for old times sake. Brought back so many memories.
It was so great, people ditched it immediately the second any alternative arrived.
Discord is just objectively terrible for knowledge. It's not search indexable or archivable. It's more or less a memory hole.
Discord is a communications platform with tacked on features that resemble forums mostly as a means of organization. It's not a KB or repository under any circumstances outside of misuse, so why would it have to be good at being searched/indexed?
Because not everything is a bug. People frequently want help and having a searchable place for past discussions it is helpful. Also this was in response to people complaining about forums and implying what came after is better so misuse is very much relevant here. Every modding community and a lot of other dev groups use discord for everything and it is from experience a trainwreck.
I hope you're not implying an old forum search was any good
Back when Google was a decent search engine you could just search "something site:someforum.com" since the built in search was so ass
Something Reddit has in common with old forums
Google didn't remove site:something from their search functionality. Yet.
Most decent forums were publicly readable online and thus got indexed by actually decent search engines unlike discord. Hence "search indexable"
I'm not sure why people think that discord search is some kind of gotcha. Its shit.
Not denying that it's shit, I don't know anyone who's actually happy with it. But old forums also weren't built nicely.
You say search indexable as if it's a panacea, but you find whatever you want to find with your search engine, click the link, and it is:
So you know that the info was there at some point, but you can't access it.
The whole of IT is different levels of shit all the time
They slowly ditched better services for convenience. The account/login struggle is the barrier to entry that myspace/facebook/discord "solved". A unique login for each forum, a different set of rules between each, some auto-deletion of supposedly inactive accounts, no photo hosting capability until death bed, yet another set of credentials for the latest photo host, and so on. Nothing was immediate because it took time to build the replacement communities and libraries. The problem is, it took years to realize how inaccessible the information became.
If the old service is less convenient that fucking Discord, it's not better.
The information is as inaccessible now, just in different ways.
We never had a good solution. We had different bad solutions, each bad in it's unique way.
I mean the masses are pretty fucking stupid and I don't think following them is a good strategy for life.
Also, reddit was and somehow still is pretty popular and stack exchange is being killed by AI not discord, so that's not really accurate anyways.
maybe you are right. i think people just forgot about it because of all the noise and because all these new platforms force bad habits. just imagine if those platforms didn't exist where would openai and anthropic be without all that stackexchange/stackoverflow data scraping.
The old bulletins of the pre2000s. ASCII art every where.
oh yeah!
Discord became big because of the seamless audio / video / screen sharing. Forums are not even in the same stratosphere.
i know, but for casual conversations and banter and a place where to store some knowledge about some topics forums were awesome.
Forums work for knowledge storage, but for casual banter real time conversations trump everything
yeah, forums are cool but I remember changing to another medium like MSN Messenger to do real time conversations
Yea... Forums were (are) great for something that Discord isn't great at...