Good to force a decision, but can we get a summary of what’s actually different between them, and what benefit there is for BlogNomic in switching? Are there any up-to-date side-by-side third-party comparisons out there that we can look at?

I’ve never used Discord, and from what BlogNomic players have said my understanding of it doesn’t go any further than “there’s no archive limit”, “it’s privacy policy is worse” and “it’s more of a social media site for gamers except not really these days”.

The last of those points is very uninteresting to me.

It has a few quality of life enhancements: the bit where it doesn’t hide older messages behind a paywall, the ability to easily organise channels, and integration for voice channels are the main perks, although again that last point is niche. I think it’s a nicer app; switching between the various discords that you’re on is easier than it is in slack, and it has a few other features that make it more socially oriented then professionally.

The big one is just having access to all the old guff we said six months ago.

Ironically I can’t check the Slack archives, but I vaguely remember somebody being unhappy that because they were already on Discord elsewhere under their real name, it would mean they’d have to join the BlogNomic Discord under it as well. Does that mean we can’t use local BlogNomic names, and/or that we might be able to see someone’s real name or offsite username, where we couldn’t before?

I believe you can set your display name on discord on a server by server basis

Discord, unlike Slack, uses one account for the whole service, rather than one per server. A user can set a nickname on a per-server basis.

Discord usernames are realistically more akin to a Twitter tag, and use of a real name for a username isn’t particularly common that I’m aware of.

(I’m unidling, by the way.)

More info https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/219070107-Server-Nicknames

Slack has integrations (which are limited by number in the free plan) and Discord does not (at least, not in the same sense). However, Discord allows any number of bots and any number of webhooks. These two features should cover any and all uses we may have had or will have for integrations.

Channels-wise: By default, Slack allows any account to make a public or private channel. Discord, however, locks that behind a mostly-robust and usually-not-confusing role-based permission system.

By default, only the owner of the server has permission to do anything beyond sending messages. Roles can be created to delegate responsibilities and grant access to specific channels. The owner of the server always has all permissions, and can always see all channels.

Direct messages are uncoupled from servers. In order to make a group DM, whoever is inviting other users must be “friends” with those users, but anyone who is in a group DM can invite further users, up to a maximum of 10.

Discord is almost entirely free. The only features you have to pay for are cosmetic (with the exception of file size limit) and I have never missed any of them. (with the exception of the file size limit, but BlogNomic should never need files larger than the default 8MB)

Discord has promised several times and at length that they will never lock anything that is not currently paid-for behind a paywall.

One thing Discord easily wins on: You can press the up-arrow to edit your most recent message. In Slack you have to keep hitting up until you’ve highlit it and then remember the button is E.

Or how about with the mouse? You right-click in Discord, and there’s the edit message button. You right-click in Slack… And you get a dropdown with a disabled “Copy” button.

Personally important to me:

- I can stop maintaining the Heroku app that I’m shocked hasn’t fallen over yet

- I can stop opening Slack, which I genuinely only have for this one thing, everything else I do moved ages ago or was never on Slack

I will add more as I think of it, now I’m going to go do the adminny things

(Quorum is 5.)

Oh, and uh, given the text of the Proposal is now set in stone… 

not unidling.

One small potential downside: discord’s native pc app does slightly invasively detect when you’re playing a game (I think without asking permission first?) and put it in your status, so it can open a whole new avenue for sniping based on whether players are distracted or not. I don’t think that the browser version does that, though, so it is a bit circumventable.

[Tantusar] Does DMs being limited to “friends” mean friendship at the BlogNomic Discord level, or across all of Discord (to the point where somebody might not want to accept a full friend request from someone they barely know at BlogNomic)?

If you and I were looking for a backchannel to discuss a scam, would other users of the BlogNomic Discord see a “Kevan and Tantusar are now FRIENDS” update somewhere and realise that we were probably up to something?

While I have many concerns around Discord due to moderation problems, I don’t really care about those here because I trust all of you all as a group and if you wanted to harass me, you already can in many more effective ways. My biggest concern with Discord is the privacy policy and the attitude that it represents. When Agora created an informal Discord, I strongly opposed it and still do not use it. I’m not sure whether I will join a Discord if we create one, but this would be a hard community to be cut off from, so I’d have to seriously consider joining. That is all to say that I am strongly this (not unidling).

(I will add here that the invite link in the post above is live, if anybody wants to go and kick the wheels during this discussion phase)

per PSS, but there’s also that Slack is a basically profitable publicly traded company, while Discord isn’t. In either case we’re living on the largesse of somebody, but in Slack’s case our benefactor has a less urgent need to squeeze something out of us, and so that situation is more stable. Discord is for now free for us with an infinite message history, but that will change sometime, sooner than Slack will change, and who knows how disruptive that would be.

I haven’t used discord too much, but when I did, I disliked it quite a lot as a user.  I don’t know why, but it always seems very slow to load the different channels and whatnot.  But maybe it’s just because of the type of servers I was logged into?  I’m not sure.

Just wanted to throw this out there, but I won’t put a formal vote because it seems like every other vote has much more thorough / important reasons behind it than personal dislike.

Oh for fu…

This proposal doesn’t do anything because it doesn’t have a SODDING APPENDIX TAG

I really hate the tags system, I mean I really hate it a lot.

I guess I’ll throw up a CfJ to directly edit the title of this post to make it compliant rather than self kill, so if you vote on this post and are not idle, please also vote for the fix cfj.

for now, mostly with concerns that we’re still unpicking the merits of both platforms, and that we will end up losing some players in the switch. Including veterans who haven’t seen this post yet - the last time this was proposed, Card and Brendan were against it.

Personally I think archives would be nice to have, but that we’ve done fine working around it by generally making sure that important discussions (like post-dynastic analysis) go onto the wiki or into blog comments. I’m not seeing any other advantages for me personally, from what’s been said, and the DM/channel/friendship stuff sounds a little on the cliquey side.

I wouldn’t like moving to discord because I already used the account for talking to friends I know in real life. It invites the chance of people seeing me there online and assuming I’m at leisure for nomic when I might not be. As far as I could tell one is unable to set their status as offline for a specific server. Furthermore, unless I’m wrong, though less concerning, one cannot change their profile picture per server, unlike slack.

Kevan, are you able to say whether slack is currently costing money to use and if so, whether that price is somewhat pricey or not? I wouldn’t mind changing to discord if that becomes an issue.

For now

[card] No, we’re using the free version, which has a few features missing (I think the main ones being that it only lets us read back over the 10,000 most recent messages, and that we can only have a limited number of app/bot things running).

I have a slight preference for slack. I’d like to see a slower changeover, perhaps adding both. Though I’m aware that maintaining both communities long term won’t work without tying them together in some fashion.

I still have slack on web but discord as an app, so it will provide convenience for me. May I ask what slack does better than discord, or is it just a matter of taste

Josh dredged this link up from the previous proposal where discord this has been suggested: https://opensource.com/alternatives/slack
and apparently it has been updated in the previous two years.

also mentioned on the slack by Jake Eakle was htts://element.io/plans-and-pricing/free-forever

Riggan, well as pokes has pointed out, Slack has a business model that is currently working and profitable for them. so the company is unlikely to take away existing features, shut down and so forth in the future unless the customers, which are mostly businesses iirc, who do end up paying stop using the service. also stated was that Discord is currently propped up by venture capitalist investors and current doesn’t turn a profit—so it’s likely that Discord will in the future take away features that are taken for granted now. but aside from some privacy concerns Discord offers most things for free while some of those same features would require money to do the same on Slack.
also Slack does have a mobile app so i don’t think “having an app” should count as being more convenient when both platforms have the same thing.

looking over the alternatives in that article, i think that either Matrix (which pokes has stated they have some experience with dealing) or hosting a service ourselves is the best course if we are going to switch from slack.

I make the current vote tally (with idle players in brackets) to be tied at 5-5:

FOR: Josh (Jumble) Tantusar Raven Cuddlebeam
AGAINST: (Scholasticus) Pokes Kevan (card) derrick

As raised on Slack, I’m bothered that three potentially light votes of “sure, why not, I already use Discord” here (Jumble confirmed this on Slack, Raven and Cuddlebeam haven’t given reasons for their vote) are enough to counteract three strongish personal-reason votes (with PSS possibly not joining us if we moved).

I’d still like to see some clarification of whether the DM/friend/channel/social-network thing means that a BlogNomic Discord could end up with veteran players being a bunch of “Discord friends” who could easily set up DM backchannels between themselves, while new players would be somewhat shut out from that. It’s useful to have a real-time backchannel at BlogNomic, it’d be good to know that Discord is still good for that.

On Slack, reproduced here for referencability:

Kevan:

One thing I haven’t seen any clarification of in the proposal comments - how different would Discord be for real-time backchannels? Tantusar’s mentioned that you have to be “friends” to DM someone on Slack; would this affect the dynamics of backchannels involving new players? (That maybe some players wouldn’t want to friend new player RandomGuy872 across all of Discord, and if I did get an alert that Josh was now friends with BlogNomic player RandomGuy872, I’d suspect they were probably setting up a backchannel.)

Josh:

So I’m not sure that Tantu was right about that - users can set their own levels of DM openness, so can require that another user be friends with them before DMs can be sent, but that’s not necessary. To test, I just DMed Tantusar (with whom I am not discord friends) and it was fine

If you do require that a user be friends with you to DM you then it may be a bot more revealing. There aren’t notifications - you won’t get a ‘Josh and Raven1207 are friends’ popup - but if you click through to either of our accounts then you can see who we are friends with, so it does open some snooping for the more security-minded [EDIT: This actually isn’t true, you can only see friends if they are mutual, so you would need to be friends with either Josh or Raven1207 to see their friendship on the other’s profile]

For what it’s worth, I have never once received discord spam, so I’m not sure that restricting DMs to friends only has much use from a privacy or security perspective, but if that is a concern then it’s worth considering

(Oh, you also have an option to restruct DMs to only people you share a server with as well, if you want a middle ground)

I have a lot of time for the personal-distate crew. I think that the functional improvements of moving away from Slack are worth it but I also think that the prime concern should be the community and the comfort of its members. If we get close to time on this and haven’t eased some of those concerns, particularly PSS’s inclination to not make the transition, then I’ll probably s/k

To address my previous comment as I have done on Slack to Josh, while I’m still reluctant to transition, I think on the balance, I would. Nevertheless, I would still prefer not to.

I’m fine with Slack or Discord. I’ve just more used to Discord because I’ve had if for the last 3 ish years