What’s of interest? Discord and Discourse - Better Together | BlogDiscourse
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Here’s a question we get a lot — Discourse and Discord. They sound awfully similar, but are they the same?
Discourse is completely open source teamwork software, designed for asynchronous written conversation, building on traditional discussion forum software such as phpBB and vBulletin.
Discord is a proprietary chat service with a video game background, designed for real-time, presence based voice, video, and text chat, building on traditional game chat applications such as Teamspeak and Ventrilo.
Discord is immediate and synchronous, while Discourse is gradual and asynchronous. Communities sometimes think these two very different styles compete with one another. Both platforms are great options for building online communities, and we believe they can work together quite well.
This is one among many items I will regularly tag in Pinboard as oegconnect, and automatically post tagged as #OEGConnect to Mastodon. Do you know of something else we should share like this? Just reply below and we will check it out.
Nice explanation, Alan. Of course, it’s worth noting that while Discourse is peerless in the ‘forum’ realm, combining excellent design and execution with the inherent superiority of being actually open (because it’s open source), Discord is entirely closed and has some competitors that best it hands-down by virtue of being open source: Matrix, Mattermost, Zulip, and RocketChat to name a few.
Going to Discord as a complement to Discourse is a step in the closed & exploitative (of your community) direction and I recommend avoiding it. Picking one of the open source options is doing a favour for your community.
A bunch of years back, Creative Commons (many of you will be familiar with it) decided to adopt Slack as its community messaging platform (which shares many of the same fundamental flaws as Discord). I wrote this reflection at the time. I also took it as the sign that Creative Commons was no longer an organisation deserving my support. I note that they’ve recently accepted that adopting Slack was contrary to their community’s values and they’ve decided (too late, in my opinion) to drop Slack and shift to an open source messaging platform - I believe they chose Zulip.
I love the Discourse platform, its openness means there are ways I can do my own customization as well as tap into the wealth of community contributions as well as a super helpful support community.
I was not implying that we were looking at any kind of Discord integration, more interesting that this was posted from the Discourse blog. Myself I find the Discord platform a bit “blingy” and I loathe all the messages trying to push features at you. But know others find it more “appealing” either for the ease of setting one up.
I also hear even from my own colleagues they find Discourse a challenge to use (some I take at my fault for continually adding more category spaces. I find the amount of interaction here lower than I would like to see.
Nope I am 100% committed to sticking with this platform.