I also want levels of notifications. Especially emergency one - Some channels are super critical and I want to be notified immediately, give me a popup, ring my phone, override if my phone is on mute, then call me. Kind of like pagerduty.

Arbitrary regex matching. Something I use in IRC often.

I don't know what the right way to handle intersecting identities is.

Most of my online identities were started when I was in college and was happy to have them tied to my real name. (This is also when Facebook was popular, still good, and college-kids-only.) Since then, cancel culture et. al. has made me more wary of having my identity-adjacent usernames show up in hobbies like gaming.

If I want to be myname in some Discord servers and anonoguy in others, is there a safe way to enforce that boundary? What about if I want to work on gaming-related open source projects or 3D prints?

As the internet moves to logged-in-and-social-by-default, it's hard to know which identity to use for which service. Moreover, when things are constantly leaking/being hacked, I don't know that I want any service to know that anonoguy and myname are personas of the same individual.

And as LLMs become the standard, I'm not sure any of this is defensible. I imagine in a decade's time, it will be trivial for an LLM to go "this account and that account have similar interests/references/ways of typing - they must be the same person."

I'm (barely) under 50, but I kind of hate it. I have no idea how to handle the un-threaded flood of messages, and much prefer something like Reddit, message boards, or even FB groups. I felt the same way about IRC back in the day and never got into it.

I use Slack at work, but at least there I have a workable plan: no notifications for most channels, read or at least skim all messages in every channel by EOD, don't read it outside of business hours unless I get a DM. Also, absolutely never join the chatty #random type channels.

He is not wrong though a bit off. Discord has 200MAU. So 97% of the global population probably have no idea what Discord is.

People massively underestimate the scale of whatsapp/facebook/tiktok (billions of MAU)

In which country? The young adults in my UK family aren't using Discord. They don't use Facebook (except to keep up with older family/associates) either though.

I think there's a much higher barrier to entry to Discord than Facebook. It won't become mainstream unless it significantly changes.

I am 77.

There is also Project Arctic Shift.

Sure, you can do that. It’s harder and not collated in the same way though.

Sort of like the people who work in big tech and the people who post on Hacker News. You'd think the intersection is an empty set, but it's probably pretty large.

Does Signal scale?

Until recently, I think the only way to join a Signal was to be explicitly added by a member. It doesn't have all the channels etc. of something like Discord.

It doesn't have enough mindshare by normies either. In San Francisco, my entire social graph was on Signal. In NYC, I'm the weirdo that uses Signal for everything. Most locals seem to only use it for things that they explicitly want to be private. Among Euro friends, only the ones with ties to the US/tech industry use it.

Signal by design doesn't have moderation and server-side conversations, it's not suitable for large groups.

Signal doesn’t have channels (text, voice) which I think is a big one.

It does in the Bay Area