Discord?

Why have I of all people made a discord server to compliment this website? It’s certainly a frequently asked question without a quick and easy answer.

Technically Speaking

After making HumphBot recently I wanted to delve deeper into making bots for discord and wanted to avoid overstaying my welcome in the Dinoware server. Creating a server in discord just to spam myself with my own bot seemed a little silly so I put some thought into what else I could use it for.

I’d also been looking into fediverse and wondering how I could share things that don’t deserve a full blog post. Collecting those in a server would satisfy my desire to share things and keep a record of them. As someone who wants to own their data and be fully in control joining an existing instance offers nothing in comparison to joining twitter. Looking into running my own instance found it would be a large undertaking either expecting to have a full OS to run everything or a pile of cloud services. From this I briefly glanced over the underlying ActivityPub protocol and decided that it would be a colossal waste of my time to proceed any further.

There is a longer1 rant to be had around the failure of open source to compete with centralised platforms but I’m not sure anyone involved is interested in hearing it. Some years ago I also looked at Matrix and spent some time attempting to create my own server before giving up. After which I continued to use IRC as my main chat platform until discord came around. To keep things short the old and successful open protocols are ones that were created to solve an existing problem in contrast to the new ones which appear to have found a successful proprietary product and wish it was open source.

A Cult of Personality

Having a blog already feels like my self importance is getting out of control; thinking that anyone is really interested in my ramblings. Raising that up to the level of discord server seems to blow that out of the water! Driving both decisions is a desire to have the content stand for itself. With my attitude to blogs being firmly of a place for me to write and others to read there was no scope for any feedback or discussion.

Letting a third party own the data does go against my ideals2 but I’m willing to compromise as the alternatives looked to be having nothing at all. When dealing with community topics the best technical answers mean nothing if no one is around to use them! For all the issues I have with discord they do offer accounts to anyone and only limit them by number of servers they can join. For a community platform there are worse options and I am in charge of how exclusive the server can be.

The goal that I hope everyone who joins can share is meeting interesting people and sharing ideas with them. You don’t have to agree with the ideas or people but with a lot of perseverance and a little luck it can become somewhere interesting to check in on every so often.

If you’ve made it this far and haven’t already joined you can find the link over in etc

Originally published on 2023/04/10

  1. No really this is the short version! I grew up on the network and have written a partially complete history of networked discussion.
  2. Ideals which are not easy to express in a footnote but generally involve having ownership and not compromising. The very things I am surrendering!