Discord really works well for my gaming. I even pay them. š¬ And as far as finding new players goes: essentially there are some generic servers, some servers for particular games or publishers, and for your tables. So you ālook for gamesā in the first two category of servers and then you send interested parties an invite to the server for your table(s).
Itās a bit weird but it works for me.
I donāt use Discord as a chat or forum in the first two kinds of servers. Way too many people and crazy amount of text flying by! But on those small gaming table server? š„°
I just look the other way when they ask me about my activities shat they can share what music I listen to and what games I play. No way!
One thing that Discord does better than IRC is help handle the dizzying amount of channels per server (i.e. per publisher, rule set or gaming table); their specific rules; their independent admins; their roles; their selective visibility: channels for certain roles only, for certain people only, group chat (ephemeral private channels); their local bots and automations; media uploads; muting for channels and servers, for certain time periods only or until you reverse your decision. All of this is great.
Yes, you can self-host an IRC server and a web frontend like The Lounge (which I do) and you can get close: many channels, but all are equal: there is no formal grouping, no independent moderation, no independent roles, no independent bots. Itās all one big soup. And if you add some rules via nickserv and chanserv, it might get you all the way but is still quite arcane. What a difference Discord makes. Plus effortless voice chat. š„°
Yes, voice chat and video chat, on top of all that.
Now, you might think: what a shill! But really: I self-host the inferior-but-free options. I write my bot to connect to both (!) IRC and Discord and free content from the black void that is the endless Discord archives. But I also want things to just work. My time is more precious than the ā¬10 (?) I spend every month. And I had to take down Jitsi because it was too resource intensive. The alternative would have been to upgrade my lousy server and spend more time sysadminning and I donāt want to.
So self-hosted IRC has voice and video only if I leech Jitsi from somebody else, as far as I am concerned.
So I donāt know where to go from here. I just pay them for the service. And I look the other way when they disallow other clients. š
But then again: I used Bitlbee for a long time. I even wrote a plugin that lets you connect to your fedi instance as if it was an IRC server and another kind soul wrote a plugin that does the same for Discord. And then you start to realize how unusable this is. Iām on maybe two dozen servers? My account has access to 200+ channels, all of the active, all of them need some sort of mapping to IRC channels? Itās hell. Notifications were out of control. I stopped doing it. So: is Discord shit, or the IRC clients? I donāt know. But I know that Discord is not all bad. Itās definitely not bad as an idea of how to organize a gazillion people.
But I do look the other way when I think about tracking and AI training and data brokering.šI donāt even know if they do it but these are the days of zero trust and fucking corpo greed maggot CEOs so it doesnāt really matter what they do specifically because I donāt trust any company to do the right thing. Maybe Iād trust them if they were a non-profit association.
Anyway. Just putting this out there because with Discord Iām playing three or four times a week and I only donāt play more because I do want to get out every now and then. š
ā#RPG ā#Social Media ā#Discord ā#IRC
Oh, I disagree 100% with the idea that Discord is good. Proprietary infrastructure with network externalities is the unending nightmare we live in. No matter how technically āgoodā it gets, itās bad. Actually the ābetterā it gets, the worse that is because it makes it harder to replace it.
Not that I agree that Discord is technically āgoodā.
The āper-server organizationā is part of the frustration since I can get pinged and spammed and bothered in channels I donāt even want just because I read other channels on that server.
Akkomaās dev team runs an IRC server of their own and they have a couple of different channels for different things, but thanks to the life-changing magic of IRC actually having its own hackable apps itās easy on the client end to sort that all out with filters and scriptable rules etc, even merge channels on the user end.
The fact that running mapping apps between Discord and IRC is clunky and difficult and ToS-breaking is another strike against Discord, not for it.