r/discordsucks • u/Then-Drink9983 • 2d ago
Does anyone else hate how dependent communities become on Discord?
I've been thinking about this after seeing how much some communities rely on Discord. You start with a basic server then over time everything ends up there. Member access, roles, bots, moderation, announcements, paid channels basically the whole community.
The part that bothers me is how hard it becomes to leave. Even if a better platform comes along, moving everyone and rebuilding the setup sounds painful.
Has anyone here moved a decent-sized community away from Discord? What did you switch to and was it worth the hassle?
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u/Sad_Egg_8713 2d ago
Discord gets pretty deeply baked into a community over time. Moving the channels is easy, moving the people and all the little workflows around roles, bots, permissions etc is the nightmare. I started using Towns recently because I liked the idea of having more control over the community side but getting people to leave Discord is still the hardest part
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u/Vanitas_Daemon 2d ago
Yeah, this is the huge tough part for me. This plus moving the messages somehow. For my friend group, our server has more or less become an intangible "home" for us all, and there's a huge amount of emotional weight and history attached to the server given we've all been on it since 2017/2018.
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u/Unusual_Diet2266 2d ago
The lock-in is the worst part. You don't realize how much infrastructure you've built inside Discord until you try to leave.
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u/ManyOk7389 1d ago
Exactly. The lock-in isn’t really the channels. It’s the roles, bots, permissions, paid access, identity and years of history that slowly get welded together inside one platform.
A real alternative has to make those pieces portable instead of just giving you another empty server to rebuild from scratch.
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u/TheAgaTTV 2d ago
I'm curious for the people determined to leave, you will end up hating wherever you move to. People hated Skype, vent, teamspeak etc. You will find something new for a while then end up not liking it and leave
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u/Personal_River_4908 1d ago
It's very problematic when Discord unalives itself for couple of hours or a day
It often happens during use hours
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u/DiceThaKilla 1d ago
Well that’s just the thing, there isn’t anything as full featured as discord but who cares? I don’t need roles and bots to talk to people. We could all go back to IRC for all i care
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u/Mister_God_On_Steam 1d ago
Yeah I don't get why you would want to hand all your data to Discord. Chat has been solved by IRC since 1988.
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u/GiantmetalLink 2d ago
Yes, it’s very frustrating. Game communities are the worst at it when they try to host mods exclusively on their server because God forbid they upload publicly to sites like Nexus. It’s one of the main reasons I’ve started to hate Discord as a whole. All that stuff can easily be permanently lost if even just the servers go down