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18 Comments

Discord vs Slack for building my own community?

I am looking to start my own community. Free for now, but planning on charging for access at some point.

Would Slack or Discord be better suited for this?

In my research I found sites like Launchpass that looks like it can take care of the charging part.

Also looked into other platforms like Mighty Network, but it seems a little heavy for now.

Edit: went with Discord https://discord.gg/kPEgvGf

  1. 2

    I'm on the discord bus too right now. not sure if it's just cos i'm bored of slack but ... feels more alive over there. and they're on a huge growth spurt.
    Slack bot API still has the edge though with buttons/ UI kit.
    Have some friends made a thread feature bot for discord, that's the main UI feature missing.
    and the channels "default all shown", i think i prefer slack "default hidden"
    voice and screen sharing are a huge differentiator tho

    Discord seems on a tear right now. It's MySpace all over again with animated GIFs!

    1. 1

      haha yeah my plan is to move off of Discord if there are signs of a strong community, and build it into a standalone one.
      until then, the current UX is good enough

      1. 1

        I checked out your links it seems that you're doing some stuff for language learning in which case discord seems like a much better bet because of all the voice channels. Also there is a number of bots for language related stuff, like kotoba
        https://github.com/mistval/kotoba

        I built a community when i was learning japanese way back in the day. http://jgram.org and i had wanted to move that all to a bot one day

        1. 1

          ohh that's cool, thanks for sharing! :)

          the community I started is somewhat unrelated to my other sites haha we mostly do a daily standup to share progress, to keep each other accountable
          https://discord.gg/kPEgvGf

    1. 1

      Thanks! That is helpful :)

  2. 2

    The only thing discord is missing is threads. In my opinion it is much more usable than Slack. If a community is on slack, I am very unlikely to use it.

    I'm a developer and a gamer though so I lean towards discord heavily. I think just ask yourself where would your average member most likely already be ? Slack or Discord ?

    1. 1

      We also found lack of threats to be a big problem when moving a community from Slack to Discord so someone here is building out a threads bot using emoji reactions

      https://github.com/EscapeRoomsCommunity/escape_roomba/pull/7

  3. 2

    I'm trying slack for xoxo.vc. I use slack for my day job and it's great. But for group chats, I'm not sure if I'll stay on it long term. We put 5-10 people in a single channel (for the 30 day bootcamp) and have shared general channels.

    • main channels quickly become flooded / useless / good stuff get's lost quickly
    • threads vs everything in the channel is kind of annoying for people (should I comment in the main thing, start a thread?!?)
    • people that come into a channel late have no good way to "catch up" besides doom scrolling back in time.
    1. 1

      I loved Slack but I think they're going to be squeezed between teams for bigcos and then all of the hipster open source projects switching to Discord for easy Screen Sharing and shared login / features, and basically a much more generous free plan. we'll see...

  4. 1

    what did you decide?

    1. 1

      discord, it was easier to set up. so far, so good

  5. 1

    I have been through a similar struggle. Penned down my thoughts on Slack v/s Discord for building a learning community here : https://medium.com/novasemita/online-learning-communities-slack-v-s-discord-9f290a69f51a

  6. 1

    I wonder why Twist is on nobodies radar. It‘s a Slack alternative that fixes the broken parts. Threads are in the center of each conversation. It helps you to keep context and focus on the conversation. Something I really appreciate.

  7. 1

    Good question @jhlyeung. I recently made a post about community tools that you might find helpful Here. You might find it helpful.

  8. 1

    Telegram.org. They got more of a professional appearance and very clean UI compared to Discord and a bigger userbase than Slack. You can create public/private groups, bots, and announcement / blog channels.

  9. 1

    Hey, @jhlyeung I am working on habitate.io, you can test our product new UI at community.habitate.io. Would love to join hands with you and build a community for you, let me know what you think. Thanks.

  10. 1

    @jhlyeung - outside of Discord, have you looked at:

    Xenforo
    Peerboard
    Tribe.so
    Vanilla Forums

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