Today has been one hell of a day, and tomorrow I will regale you all with the tale. However this evening I am going to actually bang out the topic that I originally was going to write about. This is a topic that was inspired personally by Chestnut, who was in turn inspired by GamingSF. Both are posts worth reading so you should totally check those out. Both tell a tale that I find very familiar about how they struggle with establishing a method of using Discord on a regular basis. Personally I find the whole experience of discord and having so many fragmented servers to be a little on the overwhelming side. However first let me show you the level of problem that I am personally dealing with.
This image does not represent all of the servers that I have joined. At this very moment I am sitting in 57 different servers, all with their own structures and rules and overlaps between my friend base. Some are social in nature, others are associated with game testing programs I am part of, and others are associated with various projects that I have supported over the years. The biggest challenge with all of this is that they vary in activity, stratification of infrastructure and community focus. There are a few that I have focused on interacting with specifically, but even they overwhelm me as I never can seem to be truly “present” in any of them.
The saddest part for me is that I feel like I am failing to keep up with even the discords that I started like the one associated with Blaugust. I try my best to keep tabs on the Moogle’s Pom Tavern and Geek to Geek media network but fail miserably at both of those goals. The weird thing is that I am fairly active on Slack with the AggroChat Podcast crew and I use Microsoft Teams all day every day to keep in touch with my coworkers during this time of Quarantine. For whatever reason whoever I have struggled to really find a place for Discord in my life. Maybe if AggroChat were primarily located there it would be a bit easier, but whatever the case I have it up and running in the background but find I only dip my toes into the water on occasion or if I am specifically trying to play games with a specific group that uses it for voice communication.
I think for me, in order for me to really use it well… I need a feature that doesn’t exist yet or nor likely ever will. In general I only care about the general chat channel on a given server, and I wish there was a way to create a “virtual server” of sorts that blended together more than one server. I posted this on the feature request but it didn’t gain much traction, in part because I decided to call it a Chat Mixtape, which is a thoroughly 80’s reference. I just find it too cumbersome to really try and be active in more than one server, but at the same time I find it really hard to jettison older servers in the odd chance that I might need to interact with them. The 57 servers represents what I am in now after having culled a large number of them over the years. On paper Discord is everything I want in a chat client, but in practice I just find it hard to attach for the purpose of anything other than the occasional voice chat session.
Do you also find yourself struggling to stay connected and engaged with Discord? Drop me a comment with your own thoughts, or maybe tell me how you stay “present” on the platform.
With my life right now I can’t even seem to get logged into aggrochat to talk to you, everything is just… crap right now. I feel terrible, cause I’m not keeping up with the few friends I have and finding myself turtling further and further inward, while realizing that that is the last thing I should be doing considering my depression right now. ::sigh:: oh, for the days of IRC and college when I would just sit in channel for 13 hours talking to people, heh.
huh, for some reason this posted with a wordpress account I didn’t even know I had, but this is a different computer, lol.
-Jason
I am in the same boat as you. I don’t have quite as many servers as you, but I only have around 4 at any given time that aren’t fully muted. I also have Slack for work, too, and a G2G Slack as well. I am like you in that I wish there were a way to keep the channels and servers I want consolidated a little better. As it stands, I only have notifications on for a handful of channels in these servers to make sure I always see it.
Also, thanks for the shout out for the Geek to Geek Media server! Glad we’re cool enough to be one you want to keep up with on the reg. And I am an admin there and I can’t keep up a lot, so don’t feel bad, hahah
Without opening it to check (and i only open Discord when I actively want to look at it) I think I have about half a dozen channels. The only one I pay attention to is Blaugust and the others never seem to ping, which means that either there’s a default that silences them (because I certainly never changed any settings) or they’re all totally dead.
I have a fairly strong resistance to these kind of chat systems that goes back to the old Yahoo Groups of the 90s. There was a point where, when I got home from work, I would spend the best part of a couple of hours reading and replying to people in Yahoo Groups. It went from being fun to a routine to onerous and eventually I decided I’d be happier not doing it at all. Since then I’ve been extremely wary of getting sucked into another vortex of chitter-chatter.
Discord is good in that it doesn’t seem to be very demanding. I have to actively go looking to find new comments, which puts me in charge. I’m sure that would annoy the heck out of some users but it works for me. As a result I’m considering joining a few more servers. If it started to get out of hand, thogh, I’d drop it in an instant.
I only have 28 channels with three of them being inactive/personal ones. What I found helped me a little bit was moving the icons around – the inactive ones and the ones I just joined to follow (mostly games in development), but where I only read things once in a while, are at the bottom. The ones I want to interact with are further up. But even then, I don’t really read most of them… then again, if these were forums, I doubt I would read all of them regularly either. So, I’m trying to ignore the urge to want to keep up to date with all of them. I can’t. And Discord is confusing. Also, if you miss a day of reading in a channel that you are interested in, the topic you may have wanted to join in with a comment is already gone and the group moved on to another topic. That’s something I really don’t like about Discord. It’s text-chats, not as in forums with individual conversation threads.
For me, it’s simple. I’m only on the servers I have an active interest in. That helps keep my list to a manageable size. I also use the mute channel / server option liberally as needed. For example, I’m on the Monolith Productions Discord server. I really am only interested in the No One Lives Forever and F.E.A.R. series channels so I just mute the server and drop in to read the channels as I want.
So far I haven’t needed to create server groups, but that’s an option if I had a number of similar themed Discords. Also, I have no problem leaving Discords for the various guilds I’ve pugged runs with. To me those are like joining / leaving the old Ventrilo / Teamspeak servers.
Don’t let any Discord server feel like an onerous obligation. Your time is your own. You only need to be as active as you want or have the time. Nothing says you must be there all the time. It’s easy enough for some to @mention you if they have a question for you.
I am very picky about the servers I join. Right now I am down to 4 servers from the 7 I used to hang at. One of those were delete by the owner as it didn’t have much traffic, another I left because I couldn’t keep up with each and felt it might just be better to leave if I wasn’t going to be an active participant and the last one just wasn’t feeling as fun anymore. It still feels weird though to be part of only 4 after so long.
I give a +1 to Naithin’s suggestions though, specially the one about muting specific channels. For example, in one of the servers I am at there is a Wrestling channel. Since I am not into those sports I muted it and now I know that when there is a notification for that server it is only for topics that I am interested in.
Holy moly. That is a lot of servers. I have 9 servers I count as somewhat active (with a further 3 in a muted but not removed folder).
And I view that as too many, I made some pretty tough calls on some servers to drop in order to get it down to this level. I can only imagine what it’s like to even attempt to keep up with your setup.
But a couple of things that might help:
— You don’t have to have an all or nothing approach to muting a server; you CAN mute individual channels (and you can choose whether specific @’s that target you (name, your server role, or @everyone) reach you or not through the mute.
— So with that you could run through the servers you’re on, and mute any channel you don’t wish to actively follow. It won’t give you the chat mixtape you’re after, but it WILL prevent every Discord server in the history of the world ever from lighting up with every random comment that you may not be necessarily interested in.
— Once you’ve done that channel level review, you might want to create folders to create logical groupings (e.g., blogger discords, testing, other game related, etc) — the folders function is pretty basic honestly, you can’t do any sort of mass control over the servers in a folder, but it might help with reducing the cognitive overload of seeing them all just… blah and out there all at once… and let you switch contexts between the Discords in a logical way.
Of the two ideas there, I definitely put way more value on the first. The second may or may not be of any help, but something to look at.
If you want any help how to actually do either of these things, let me know. 🙂