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Why discord and not IRC?
Seems like the main option for real time chat related to Codidact is Discord.
Were there any other alternatives considered? Why was Discord chosen?
There are older, more established options for real time chat like IRC. In my experience, a lot of people object to Discord on principle. I believe the main issues are:
- It's not a privacy friendly company
- The UX of Discord is poor
- It is very proprietary so it's hard to use custom clients
Many other alternatives, like IRC and Matrix chat do not have these problems. Is there a reason why the Codidact chat was not set up on something like that? For example, why not just use a room on Rizon?
1 answer
The reason Discord was chosen is disappointingly simple: It's just the chat software I used and knew best when I invited some people over from Stack Exchange to start this project. The Discord server for Codidact existed before the network of Q&A sites did.
Then the whole thing kind of exploded and now there are 700-ish people on the server.
Was it the best choice? Probably not.
Should we migrate to a different platform though? Ehh, probably also not. We've seen like three or four times during the Codidact project that migrating large-ish communities to new platforms is hard and has an enormous loss rate. For example, when we migrated the Community-specific Discord servers to an all-Commmunities server, there were quite a lot of people who didn't follow to the new server and thus just disappeared.
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