Help! I find Discord to be nearly unusable, yet so many dev tool companies use it as a primary interface for their communities. I have two questions for this community: 1. Can anyone here offer me tips on how to interact with Discord in a way that doesn’t feel so dreadful (it currently feels impossible to stay up to date on all the discussions and just as difficult to try to catch up)? 2. If you were starting a community for a dev tool today what technologies/approach would you take? (The feeling you are trying to create is, inclusive, welcoming, rich with information. Kind of like a mix between beautiful library that welcomes readers of all skill level and holds seemingly magical archives with works that only true experts would seek out, and a portion of a public part where you know you can reliably hang out and hear what the scene is talking about.) Thank you in advance for your suggestions which will surely be better than the impulses I feel to grab a dull spoon and aggressively antagonize my eyeballs every time I am on Discord for more than 5 minutes.

well it sort of has threads now so always use those and then you can see when someone replies in your notifications, and other than that I don't really try to follow the other chats as its usually quite noisey.

I find getting/keeping on top of all discussions is more a problem of raw volume than the software. Small discord servers are easy to keep up on. With large ones, like most popular community servers, I don't bother trying, and instead pick a few channels to focus on. But that was true old-school forums, too. I recommend disabling most notifications. For a new community, I don't know, maybe one of the nice XMPP servers. That's more viable than average for a tech community in particular. They're trying to make it happen again. https://xmpp.org/software/?category=servers&cscore=advanced&csim=advanced&csmobile=advanced&csweb=advanced&csav=core I remember hearing good things about Prosody as a relatively turn-key setup, but ejabberd is obviously one of the classics. Someday I'll test-drive a couple of them..m

@Andrew F Thanks for the reminder that even with old school forums one rarely tried to digest every discussion topic.

Mute every server by default and enable notifications selectively on certain channels. Most servers have dedicated announcement roles that go through the "Mute" so you won't miss important bits.

@dman-os thank you for these tips!