I think you could probably just say "it became popular because it's free and everyone could use it to game with friends". Those of us that have fallen out of gaming or people that don't game might not literally have any idea why anyone uses it. So you could both be right. You are taking their zero to one by providing the answer.

I think there is a whole generation of people that have very fond memories of discord and everyone outside that window does not have that connection at all.

An addendum to that might be that other people have used other services before discord even existed that had better (?) feature sets but didn't win out and that can create confusion because neither group of people understands what the other group is talking about because there is no shared experience.

> low-friction

is the key here

the same reason WhatsApp and Telegram won on their markets

i think a certain brand of hackernews user just likes being completely obtuse in a bid for superiority.

how could anyone possible enjoy x mainstream thing, i only use y hyper niche thing that signals my status to tech nerds.

queue the guy talking about the most obscure linux distro you can possibly imagine.

It used to be. The core offering is still functional. But with every update it becomes less usable. Orbs, badges, glittery avatar borders, aggressively animated, rainbow gradient text usernames, and now ads embedded directly into the UI.

Right. Many communities and project teams saw a real need for an IRC replacement, whether literally or not, and Discord was the least bad choice simply by existing. And IRC channels were of course just as un-googlable without setting up a logging bot and a crawlable archive.

But they sure are upset now that Discord bans accounts based on reports to its thought police.

Both things can be true.

Not necessarily because they were scared, but probably a lot of them got banned or saw their friends get banned from Reddit, and couldn't get back on because Reddit has quite strong detection for ban evaders, so after the initial anger period, Reddit just disappeared from their mind altogether.

I'm on 3 high school and 5 college servers. It's not just for games. Most companies won't use it for work because they have a pretty bad security record and no enterprise features, but it's perfect for any small to mid size community.

I'm in 1 Discord for Gaming, the rest (about 45) are all non gaming related (though discussions sometimes happen). Including AI, Development, Art, Music, etc. I think Discord has a wider audience that many aren't aware of.

Your response is the "Chef's kiss". It's exactly these kind of policing actions that drives content away from the masses.

No one said discord wasn't popular. It's substantially popular with gaming communities. It's also very popular with non gaming communities, many of which found it an an alternative to Reddit and others.

This is true but I think it's both.

The popular predecessor to Discord was TeamSpeak. It ran on your own servers and that made it hard to set one up. That's why Discord groups are called "servers", they were hijacking established teamspeak terminology their audience would be familiar with.

And reddit died around the same time by extreme over-moderation.

"How dare you make a claim I don't agree with. Your opinion should be flagged and hidden from the view of the public!"

It's like you custom designed your post to make his exact point.

> This is such a far fetched/reactionary comment, that it's frankly surprising it hasn't been flagged.

"This is such a wrong thing to say that I'm surprised you haven't received reprisal for it"

Proving his point in real time

On Reddit for example most of the popular subs would ban you for saying Israel's doing a genocide, even if it's relevant to the thread topic, e.g. if the topic is a news post about USA sending money to Israel.

You also can't call anyone or anything fascist, or say anything that an LLM can twist into being a call for violence. For a while they were banning anyone who said the word "Luigi".

Are you really questioning if there is reprisal against users or communities that don't toe the line? Cancel culture?

Let's talk Covid discussion, Hunter Biden's laptop, Political opinions, Discussions on Sexuality & Gender, etc. Ironically look at Bluesky last year and the efforts to switch because there was no longer suppression of certain opinions? (How'd that work out).

> Discord, Zulip, Fluxer

It's on Poob. Poob has it for you.

> Just as friendly feedback, monospace fonts are difficult to read for me for that kind of content.

Yes! Feedback is great and means a lot to me. I never thought about that. I do wonder though how do I exactly fix that as monospace is rather the core identity of my website. I might have to re-think the whole website but I will try to provide the ability for your own fonts. I would sincerely love some great feedback here as well because I had built it extremely with monospace in mind because I thought that it would look good. But perhaps it looks good but monospace is not practical here as you suggest. I can be wrong, I usually am and it was just me wishing to play with monospace fonts.

> says “terminal-grade communities” (whatever that means),

It just sort of reflected the style of it being terminal or (retro?) but if I have to answer what that means: It probably means nothing relevant, as such, I will remove it.

(Full story for those curious)

It was an experiment: I just had bought a domain out of an mirror: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47330475 (TLDR: someone on HN wanted to show someone else mirror so they showed mirror.org and It led to a very high price so I wondered what the cheapest mirror.<tld> which I like could be), mirror.online was available for 1st year for 1$ at Namecheap (I use tld-list.com to find cheap domain tlds)

(extreme side note I also have a custom tampermonkey script to sometimes find the cheapest one ie. completely available not premium domains but yeah I need to make the script slightly better)

[I built the project because the domain was idling and I wanted to experiment with the architecture of a pure golang binary with modernc sqlite and a 7$/yr VPS and https://owickstrom.github.io/the-monospace-web/ and I wanted a real project for that so I thought of it after discovering fluxer]

It is sadly vibe-coded. Thus the terminal-graded community comment. I am sorry if I didn't disclose it. I tried to show it to people and didn't get much response and so in the end, I was still happy with the experiment because I just wanted to tinker around but after its completion I was satisfied thus I didn't tinker more with it other than running it and showing it to my friends sometimes.

But knowing that a person cares about it to give me feedback enough makes me warrant to fix the changes that you've mentioned. I will try to fix them.

I will try to add an about-me page and make it better.

Though that being said, I think that the domain renewal is coming soon and I might sell the domain as renewal of 20$ is still slightly expensive for me for experiments (college student budget here!). If I do that, I will hopefully try to create a last archive.org pointing to a new subdomain of a more long lasting domain that I will try to have.

Have a nice day :-D