A Discord Problem

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. The post A Discord Problem appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.