I think there's room for both, as in the old days there was typically an IRC channel along side forums that was typically a secondary channel (but not always).

But yeah, forums would be ideal, preferably with federation support so there is no need to make an account with every single one.

Forums are just not great for real-time interaction like discord chat is, not to mention the integration of voice chat, video streaming, etc is just too convenient to give up without replacing it with something similar. I too wish discord/whatever replacement gets attention was more searchable and kept stuff long-term, but.. if you want to post info that lasts, post it on lemme and link it on discord or whatever.

discord is not a forum (even if they want it to be with the forum channels), its never been a good location to store information. That being said, its amazing for real time communication unlike forums. I hate that devs use it for FAQ and bug forms and stuff. I stopped reporting bugs if it requires me to join a discord.

Discord is more of a chat room than a forum though, lemmy is a federated alternative to forums.

I think we just need to split roles again.

Discord did there best to be an all in one solution and we just need a return to real time chat and voice along with asynchronous communication like forums

Exactly. I wish they would have just built a great UI on top of Matrix or even XMPP, but they insisted on doing it this way. None of my friends want to switch to something that they're boxed-in with, they don't want an app just for one server. Matrix is the only option we have, but all of the UIs are... meh.

Also, revolt self hosting is broken. The web call functionality (WebRTC) is being rewritten but that effort is stale and out of the box it simply does not work. There is no real documentation about this either. It just won't work and you need to invest a lot of effort to figure out why. The moment self hosting properly works, I'll give it another shot. Not being able to connect without a fat client is a show stopper for me. There's no way I can get enough traction for my groups if the barrier to switch is higher than a sheet of paper.

When self hosting all the shortcomings you mentioned are perfectly acceptable for me.

Yeah, and it’s doubly infuriating because Discord is not a good replacement for support forums. It isn’t searchable via search engines, and even the built in search is fucking dog water.

Let’s say I have an error, so I google “{Program} {Error code} Solved”. With a forum, I would find a thread that is already talking about the specific error, with comments regarding troubleshooting steps or a solution… But with Discord, all I get is a generic link to the program’s server.

And even once I’m in the server, there often isn’t a good way for me to find existing threads about my specific error. Maybe I check the pinned messages, but some servers have dozens of channels; am I expected to check the pins on every single channel? Oftentimes that seems to be the expectation, because asking a question will often just get a “check the pinned messages, ya thud-fuck” type of response.

Or maybe I search it, but (again) am I expected to search every single channel? And since Discord doesn’t use fuzzed searches, searching for “Error code 0x00548327” won’t return any results if the thread simply uses “Error 548327” instead. With Google (or any half-decent search engine, really) you get results for both. But not with Discord.

So instead, I ask in the support channel. And that leads me to my final gripe… My response takes actual effort from another person in order to solve. Maybe I get lucky and they have a bot set up to respond to a keyword/error number in my comment… But if not, or if I didn’t use the specific keyword that the bot was searching for, then I need to rely on other people. If there are 200 people with the same issue, that’s 200 times that someone needs to respond to what is essentially the same message. With a forum, you could simply find the post, and read the responses. No human interaction necessary, because it has already been done. The question and answer process has already happened. But with Discord, I’m forced to wait on someone to actually respond, and the devs/admins actually need to dedicate time and resources to ensuring it gets answered. That constant vigilance takes a lot more time and effort away from actual mod duties.

This is super hilarious, ’cause host a devlog is so simple, it can be done in ssh, even in forsaken email. While lemmy is literally here.

Just imagine the good they could have done by being a new competent Matrix client that can do everything, but instead they are a Discord clone.

Classic

Sure! It's great that there is other options, too. So people have options available to them if they want to explore those.

I'm not promoting this as a end-game solution to everything. It's not even my server.

I'm just sharing this in case people who enjoy gaming and Linux and the people behind the projects, they might want to join in.

Mobile app Revolt is nice, but doesn’t support servers that aren’t the main one yet last I tried.

They already have done that a while ago.

No