Ah, the dream of having control over others alive even in a space as pathetic as a video game chat room. You definitely aren’t doing it wrong your way.

a server I was a part of a while ago had maybe 30 people, but with a ton of topic based channels. the 'owner' would CONSTANTLY bitch about conversations being too specific for general and reprimand people.

even in one server I'm currently in, which has ~2500 members, there's really only 50 people active on it. one of the mods still does this all the time ("tAkE iT tO #PoLiTiCs") and it inevitably only ends the conversation every time. nice "community".

I'm reminded of forums that would have a million subforums and as a result never build up any critical mass. Have one big bucket, maybe two, and if something comes up often enough organically then, and only then, consider a separate subforum for it.

This is the answer.

For whatever complaints one might have about Discord (and they are legion), it does a really good job of packing a bunch of different functionality in one place and with a UI that's super easy to grasp and understand what does what and how that requires very little foreknowledge of what the thing is or its underlying mechanisms.

If I am completely new and pretty blank of what it is, Discord's pretty good at me being able to catch up quickly; it's got a good UI and, following that, functionality for a bunch of things related to communication. And, if I need a quick solution that just gets me going…that's gonna be pretty painless.

Exactly. Whats funny is facebook could have done this in like... 2010. Like I'm fairly certain I had "group pages" back then that were a very small number of people. But you're right, the channel thing is crazy useful. Like my one group has 3 people, but we've got like 50 topics. It's gotten to the point there are archives, ie: the "thanksgiving" channel moves from the "archive" group to "general" group around mid sept.

I've also been lucky enough to avoid having it be work related. Like I have slack for work, that notification noise is the devil, where as the discord notification noise means my buddy is posting pictures of his kid.

1000% agree. Like I use it for some spread out family (one server) and college friends. There's <5 people in each. I think eventually forums will adopt the fediverse infrastructure. I'm on an old school forum for my vehicle, and it's great. It's direct out of 2010, it wouldn't suprise me if those kind of sites brought in all the code that the fediverse runs off of. As a casual observer, that's really what lemmy seems like to me: "what if 2005 internet, where people managed their own webpages, but it ran on a common architecture that made it easier to cross-link with other sites if you wanted?"