Discord (and Mastodon to a lesser degree) feels more like a bunch of large skyscrapers, but they're almost all empty and lifeless

I guess one way to explain it more is just that IRC had much fewer channels (usually one for a community, sometimes two or three) but with Discord you have many different servers and they all have a huge collection of channels.

None of the Discord servers I'm in, sparing two, have less than 5 channels. Some have 10 or even 20. It's ridiculous.

(The two exclusions are extremely small, limited-focus ones, with only a handful of people)

@Xkeeper I dunno. Our apartment has four rooms even though we're only “one person”, but it doesn't bother us being in one at a time. We have a tiny private Discord thingamajig with 3–5 channels in it, and if it were actually in use right now, we wouldn't anticipate them all being _active_ at once.

Which kinda points to “the perceptual overload might be more from placelessness/presencelessness” to me.

@imetagon One person in four rooms is not that big of a deal; if you have that few, then you are lucky. But in my case it is like 20 servers with 10 rooms each.

Many of them are only active very briefly.

@Xkeeper @imetagon

two things to blame for this

- the sport utility vehicle syndrome, or what if we NEED a room for competitive cake baking
- the reddit-trademarked garbage bin approach to moderation, or some people are annoyed about competitive cake baking talk so we banished it to its own hellhole

@Xkeeper @imetagon

garbage bin driven moderation is a pet peeve of mine

if you feel a topic is brought up too often to the point of annoyance, you either bring up some OTHER interesting topics to talk about, or you just check back later

@Xkeeper @imetagon the /r/formula1 discord is the gold standard for this sort of shit

not pictured: the room with live event discussion for people with a 30 second delay, or the same but for people with a 70 second delay

@Xkeeper I've never understood why people spawn so many channels for a tiny number of users. like every subject of discussion had to be segregated

@Xkeeper "irc had much fewer channels"

at least, that you hung out in. there's mad numbers of channels on irc servers usually. you're just not in all of them at once really.

@dotUser Well yeah, but like

If i want to join Community X, it USUALLY has a single channel. Sometimes two or three.

If I join Community X's Discord Server, there are more like five or six!

(Jul's own is a great example of this.)

@Xkeeper @dotUser I'd say (rudely hops into conversation) that the issue is that if you join a community's IRC channel, it takes time before you get acclimated enough to join the "sub-channels" and the like; in Discord you're normally dumped in all of them by default. Increased discoverability, most likely...

@nicole @Xkeeper In that case, a community should opt to implement a vetting setup. I ran a discord that way for a while. Unfortunately, that kind of makes people *less* inclined to stick around. On IRC those same people may feel a certain channel *should* exist, and will just try to create if it doesn't exist. Then you have... Yet another channel. Whether the individual decides to throw around invites or not though...

@nicole @Xkeeper Plus I mean really; Discord isn't meant to be IRC. So I do not know why any of us wastes time making relations between the two, hmm.

@Xkeeper i really don't like how by default you are in all the channels available to you on discord. it's really noisy.

@Xkeeper IRC channels are comparable to Discord servers. Discrod just spreads the discussion among different rooms and that makes it seems like ghost towns

@GeekDaddy "seems like" \:|