Imagine communication server as... a house

Discord server is a flat. It's full of predetermined brick-walled rooms (channels) that have titles on the doors. You look at the titles, you choose the closest to the topic you want to talk about, you walk in.

Slack server is a meeting place. It has rooms, rooms have titles... but you can't talk in them. If you start a conversation there, you're encouraged to "go outside" (to a thread) with whoever joins you to solve the problem. If you walk into the room, you'll only see pointers to "meeting places outside" (also sometimes you can't even discover that room exists without a pointer?)

And Zulip is a warehouse (or a blimp hangar) - it's one open space with no walls. When you come in you hear everyone echoing off the walls. To not get lost, there are markings on the ground that color-code which parts of the space are for what category. And people are standing in groups, so you can come closer and concentrate on one topic at a time

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If I want to ask a question,

- on Slack I'm immediately get shoved into a car and driven away to discuss (I don't feel community)

- on Zulip I have to navigate the cacophony of main screen, stand in the open and scream my question, hoping that people approach and form a group around me (I feel both open and alone)

- while on Discord I walk into a room that's "close enough", maybe look at conversation that happened right before to get a feel, and ask away (I feel like I'm in a lived-in space and can navigate the tone)

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If I want to participate in a conversation

- on Slack I have to keep track of new threads. I have to explicitly open each one. I have to read through to see the convo state

- on Zulip I have to scan the "all recent messages" main screen, form an opinion on what discussion I'm interested in, explicitly open it, start reading last messages (now of the specific topic) again to form opinion again on what the state of convo currently is

- on Discord I can see the channel name to pre-emptively get general theme I'll be in (and I can mute channels I'm completely not interested in), I open it and start acquainting myself with the current convo state right away, learning specific topic from the context

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I can definitely see how Discord's hard structure-ization can fail on large scale, when there is constant demand to use the rooms.

And I definitely have experienced channel "memory leak" (when they get allocated at one point and stop getting used as activity lowers, necessitating archival or garbage collection)

But I do feel that discord got that perfect middle ground between "everything together" and "everything in separate" extremes that all other options tend to fall into