Discord is not an alternative to forums or the likes

13 minute read Published: 2025-08-05

Everyone knows what Discord is, it's that one application practically everyone uses to send messages and have voice calls with each other and stuff.

On there, anyone can host a collection of chat rooms called "servers" for free! Users can be assigned different roles so that they can moderate certain rooms, or have some rooms hidden away from them, thereby creating a hierarchy that makes managing large servers relatively easy.

In fact, it's so easy (and free) that it's considered by many to be an alternative to the traditional forums! That was the case even before Discord introduced the Forum Channels feature back in 2022, which mimics how those traditional forums work.

How the initial experience differs

I'd like to get something out of the way really quickly: The aforementioned Forum Channels feature hardly offers anything different from the usual Discord experience. That feature essentially allows a user to create a chat room with its (initial) topic being that user's post. This chat room in itself is not different in any way. In other words, that feature is simply an easy way for a user to create a chat room among other rooms created with that method.

So the question basically becomes, how is a chat room different from a forum on the web?

Let's talk about the flow starting from right after the initial post (or message, henceforth "post") is created, because making that initial post is practically the same experience no matter where.

You make your post on Discord, it shows up instantly to whoever happens to be looking at that same server at the same time, it can send a notification to the people who asked to be notified on every message, and it'll send a notification to users that have received a @mention!

Because people keep the Discord app open in case they get a notification or that they want to quickly send a message to someone, I'd say there's a real high likelihood of someone seeing this post within 1 minute, depending of the size and liveliness of the server of course.

Now let's say you're making a post on an active forum, for example the Godot Forum which uses Discourse. Well actually no, first you need to create an account, because practically all forums require users to have an account before posting, and accounts are separated between forums (websites) so you cannot use an account you created on another forum.

To quickly compare with Discord, people usually have a Discord account, and if they don't, they only need to register once! It is true there is the additional requirement of joining the server in the first place, but joining a server literally takes 2 clicks. Put simply, the authentication step is more convenient when it comes to Discord.

Alright, this time for real, you're making a post on a forum. Like on Discord, you can @mention someone, and people can ask to receive a browser notification whenever there's a new post. There are however some differences, for example:

In both cases, a reply would appear immediately if you're looking at your own post, and you can go out of your way to configure things to get more noisy, more noticeable notifications.

I'd say the initial experience isn't really different. The differences really start to show when you first look at how most replies will be... "shaped" differently.

Comparing a live chat to a series of letters

Despite how quickly you will likely see the reply to your post, the forum is simply not a chat room. In the case of the Godot Forum, its FAQ currently has those two bits of content:

If you are not sure your post adds to the conversation, think over what you want to say and try again later.

Don’t post no-content replies.

In other words, you as a user are discouraged to send anything if it won't add much that is meaningful, or to send content in separate messages; you need to think about what will be contained in a single message.

It would be fair to say this changes the entire flow of the conversation, it reminds me more of how it works with emails than how it works in Discord, where a chat room can be compared to a physical room where people can come and go and really say everything and nothing.

On a forum, once you've made your post/reply, you're better off doing something other than just wait for another reply, until you get a notification of course, which you can check whenever you want!

While on Discord, if there's a flow going and one active person (who might be you, who made the post) is there while another person is replying, then it's difficult to justify starting to go do something else, the reply might just be sent in a few seconds, you know? And if you stop replying for a while, the flow might just break!

The flow breaking on Discord can make it difficult to resume a conversation, in no small part due to the chaotic nature of a chat room. Tangents happen, messages get drowned, people become unavailable, relevant stuff gets forgotten, etc...

So, am I just saying that Discord and forums have formats that are so different that they shouldn't be replacing each other? I wouldn't blame you if you'd answer "yes" to this question, but there's more to it than that.

Historicity

A word I would use to describe the very existence of a Discord server or chat room would be "fickle". Discord's privacy policy is one hell of a disaster, one notable thing is that every message you ever sent is recorded, even the deleted ones, even the ones on deleted chat rooms, and even the ones from deleted accounts. When you delete your account, your messages remain basically as they were to every user.

And yet, nothing, absolutely nothing, guarantees your access to these conversations. In the case of a chat room on a Discord server, here's stuff that can happen that will hinder your access:

What I mean to say is that your conversations on Discord servers are not things you will always be able to even read! If you wish, tools to export Discord chat rooms do exist but it should be noted that they're a third party, meaning such tools are supported until their developers move on or until Discord somehow breaks compatibility with them, as they can as they're not responsible for maintaining them. Meanwhile, alternatives such as Matrix's Element have had such tools that are first-party for a good while now!

Alright, but forums can shut down too, hence removing any and all traces of what happened on them, right? Well yeah, that's very true, I will however argue that there are factors that make them, in my opinion, more durable than a Discord server, such as:

You might agree with me when it comes to the history of a forum being easier to preserve, but you might not think that it is an important thing in the first place. Like, you might simply not care if a chat room or a forum vanishes, if it vanishes, it most likely means it won't be relevant anymore in the future.

I believe that's a fair opinion, yet I can't help but feel that it's a bit pretentious to be so sure of that. Trends emerge essentially out of nowhere, things revive when you think they're dead, people you don't know pick up hobbies at the same time you give up on those, I would even argue it can simply be fascinating to look back on old posts to see how things have transformed over time!

And I believe Discord, as opposed to forums, can be hostile to the idea that things can have multiple lives. When you don't manage to find (an invite to) a fitting Discord server for a hobby or something like that, you create another server, and that essentially splits a community, splits a history.

Discoverability

I may repeat myself there, but Discord is a closed ecosystem. For a so-called Discord server, this creates conditions that worsen its discoverability compared to forums, for example:

Discoverability obviously matters in that it defines how easily everything can be found, it's especially important if there is to be a list of important resources or any kind of support/help people might be looking for!

Because admittedly, it might not matter too much if a conversation you've had is not preserved or straight up inaccessible to people from certain countries, but something I've been kinda avoiding mentioning is how resources (or lists of those) are kept in those walled gardens that are called Discord servers, I can't help but say it's terrible!!

And even then, there's an argument to be made about how you segregate yourself from the Turkish, the Chinese, and the such only because their governements suck and because they (the people) might lack the knowledge to circumvent the restrictions imposed on them, and it would be silly to say that such people do not exist.

To add on to that last paragraph, it is true that they may not speak your language (English?) but keep in mind the percentage of people who speak English is increasing! And that's putting aside AI and all the tools that allow someone to understand text in any language!

Although, I'd like to note that the really big Discord servers (like the one for Celeste, the video game) are not only rather easy to discover, they're easy to stumble upon for regular Discord users, if not to search for. It is not the case for the huge majority of Discord servers.

Conclusion

Strictly speaking, there's no software that's better or worse than the other, because each has its own use cases. Throughout this post of mine, I've been making the point of how Discord cannot properly replace forums, though it's of course also unreasonable to replace chat rooms with something like forums!

And yet, it feels like people have been using Discord in part to replace forums. For example, the Unturned forum is closing this year and encouraging people to move to Steam, Discord, and Reddit for discussions and suggestions. Archipelago has community-supported games which are only listed in their Discord server, and so is most of the technical support, which guarantees the same questions being asked again and again!

Don't get me wrong, it is fine to have a Discord server, chat rooms are inherently cool. But if you care about all the things I've talked about earlier, I don't believe you should cheap out and put everything on there, even if it's convenient for the people that are on your Discord server. (or if you do, at least make it redundant by having it on there AND somewhere else)

So please, if you have a Discord server, consider how it may not be ideal, and consider seeking out solutions to resolve the problems that you find! Those solutions may not even be forums, they can be wikis, subreddits, a Discord alternative, other software, and different mixes of those!