I've been running a Discord server for about four and a half years now. When I started streaming during the pando, I had no idea that I would end up building a community. Hell, I'd never even used Discord before. I only knew what it was because I had to stop my students from using it.
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But folks kept asking for one. My viewers expected a community hub in which people who found their way to my Twitch streams could find each other, even when I was not live. As the whole streaming thing was itself an experiment in remote learning for me, this seemed a natural extension. So now, I have some mileage on me as a community moderator. I'm intimately familiar with the features Discord offers, and all the arguments against using it. I'm sensitive to them, FOSS dork that I am. I'm also keenly sensitive to the arguments about data loss inside of a forever-chat. In fact, I'm so sensitive to it that I even tried to address the problem in some small way.
But Discord, like all freemium services, is a risk. At any moment their advertising model could become intolerable, or their policy about using my data to train AI could change, or their pricing could get out of control, or some other rent-seeking nonsense common to internet services trying to stretch their profit margin.
I need an exit strategy. Anyone using Discord needs an exit strategy. The trick is to find a landing spot that users will tolerate, and that allows the community to continue in some fashion. Change is loss, and that is excruciatingly true for community platforms. Any switch comes with an attrition rate, meaning the destination better be worth the cost in headcount.
For this reason, and for another project, I've been deeply researching Discord alternatives for the better part of a year. Some of my colleagues may think me a bit obsessed about the importance of a "chat app," but I'm convinced that the communication mechanism for online communities is critical to their success. Choosing a new one could be the a matter of life and death for the community. This is a decision we have to get right the first time.
So here, humbly submitted, are my rankings of many of the Discord-like alternatives for maintaining online communities.
Evaluation Criteria
I've arrived at five broad categories in which an online community platform needs to perform.
Functionality: can it do everything required of a platform for building, organizing, and sustaining a community?
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