Don't Put All Your Eggs Into One Discord Server

Discord, or the Death of Lore, wherein Jason Scott, who you might know from his work for the Internet Archive, delves into why the popular online communication platform Discord shouldn’t be used in place of a website, particularly for any information of value:

I have no disputes as the popularity of the places, the things that happen there, and the unquestioned vivaciousness of being the party that never seems to end and everyone wants to join.

I just happen to be the sort of person who notices there’s no decent fire exits and most of the structure is wood and there’s an… awful lot of pyrotechnics being set off.

Discord’s official birthday is 2012, but it’s really 2009, when OpenFeint was created.

OpenFeint is the pile of bones worn into the foundation of Discord telling us it was built on land that will very occasionally flood to great catastrophe. It was founded in 2009, was given a huge ecosystem of plugins and support, gained ten million followers, took in roughly $12 million of known VC investment, was sold to a Japanese company in 2011 for $104 million, and was fucking dead in the ground by 2012. By the flickering light of its Viking funeral, Discord was founded and the cycle began anew.

Spare me the “they learned their lesson speech”, and please store it in this garbage can I’ve already stuffed with the “it won’t happen again” and “you don’t know what you’re talking about” bags I tend to get. It will happen again; it’s just a matter of when.

The main considerations I have are what will be lost.

Jason has probably been in many more Discord servers than I ever have, but from my own experience, I can say that they’re great for some things and terrible for others.

For real-time communication and collaboration, it is absolutely brilliant.

Forums are okay, but no substitute for dedicated websites running web apps designed for that task. Most importantly, Discord server forums are completely hidden from an internet search, meaning there’s very little chance that you’ll find someone else asked that question and/or provided a good answer.

Search in Discord only works within the server you’re currently accessing, and the results pane makes it easy to jump to the relevant conversation, but that pane can be very cramped and require a lot of scrolling and paging.

Crucially, as Jason points out near the end of the post, there’s currently no way to permanently archive and then export valuable information and resources accumulated through Discord.

I get it — websites require time and energy, and possibly financial cost, to set up and maintain, and Discord is quick, easy and mostly free. But a website will last longer, particularly if the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine can access it.