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?”

They do still exist, I have a specific but popular vehicle, and there’s a dedicated forum style site directly from 2011.

In a perfect world, that would be folded into the “fediverse” protocols, but like they’re already paying their own hosting etc. In the end that’s all reddit did: absorb some nominal hosting and IT for exposure. It made sense for hype niche communities, which is how reddit grew, but now that they’re killing control of the communities… Well… It turns out people were willing to pay for those servers back when they were expensive…

Discord is amazing for a step beyond group messages. I have no idea how it got into a roll as a “community tool”.