People talk about Discord on here for chat rooms a lot. Is it open in some way that Slack is not? Looking at their website it seems like it's basically... just Slack.
I've been musing, this morning, about Twitter:Mastodon::Slack:???
@benhamill differences are:
- you can easily create a server
- there is no limit of the history (Slack limits the search option if you don't pay)
- vocal chat
- you can contact people accross servers, by creating private groups: you don't depends on the server you suscribed to
- Discord is full free, some Slack features need to pay.
@benhamill I don't know much about slack but Discord is free and low-maintenance to run a server (plus free voice chat, as @zigg said). And with my limited experience, I found it a bit easier to use than slack. A lot of people have written bots for this that and the other thing in Discord.
@HereticSoul @zigg Free Slack plan has voice chat, too.
Do you actually deploy-and-host your own Discord server the way you would a Masto instance? I thought it was just a sign up and hosted by them?
@zigg @HereticSoul I didn't see any mention of setting up a server or deploying software on their website when I poked around just a bit ago.
@benhamill @HereticSoul I was positive Slack voice was paid plans only.
Discord is entirely hosted, but they call their teams "servers".
@benhamill Twitter is to Mastodon as Slack is to Matrix.org
@lifning That's interesting. Thanks.
@benhamill slack is marketed towards companies, discord is marketed towards discord.
important distinction.
@benhamill discord is:
* cheaper (ie, pay per user to unlock some features like global emotes)
* it *is* hosted for you, and closed source, like slack
* discord voice chat sucks several orders of magnitude less than the slack voice chat
* discord has really fine-grained moderation and ACL systems, unlike slack
* discord allows you to just drop an invite link somewhere and have people join your server, unlike slack, where you have to invite people
@er1n Thanks. What's an ACL system?
@benhamill access control lists
an example:
you could create an #announcements channel and a 'moderators' role, and give users with the 'moderators' role r/w to #announcements, and give everyone else read-only
any user can have any combination of roles.
this makes moderation actually... possible? on discord, unlike slack
b/c you can tempmute someone, or voicemute them, or ban them from a specific channel, without actually hardkicking/banning them
@er1n I see. Cool. Thanks.
@benhamill oh, and the discord terminology "server" is essentially the same as a slack "Team"
@benhamill I think I might like Discord better but no, it's basically Slack but with voice chat.
RochetChat seems to be open? I dunno.
@dconley Slack is also Slack but with voice chat, now.
Someone mentioned Matrix.org, which seems like what I had in mind, at least roughly.
@benhamill it's not any more open, it's just tailored for a slightly different kind of experience, more centered around gaming and voice chatting than slack is. one of the big things is you can easily join multiple communities and servers on discord with a single account, whereas IIRC you need to signup for individual slack servers.
@benhamill Discord has free voice chat—that seems to be the key difference in the little time I've looked at it.
IRC is sorta federated 😁