Or at least use it as a supplement, not the primary source.

Discord is at its core an instant messaging platform. Text and voice. Over the years they’ve bolted on community-like features which are attractive. However, they have a few key anti-features that are bad for communities and the Internet as a whole. There are two key disadvantages, and I might argue they’re HUGE.

Search, Indexing, and Reference

Discord is a black box. Any information in Discord is segregated from the Internet. It doesn’t appear in search engines, can’t be indexed and referenced by things like The Internet Archive or readily linked to, without account, for individuals to share information. Any knowledge built there might as well not exist to anyone but the small number of individuals that bothered to create an account and access whatever information they can find. It also fails on that front pretty spectacularly. Their search by modern standards is decent but not spectacular so finding useful past information is difficult to impossible.

Content Ownership and Security

The second giant disadvantage to using Discord is ownership of content. As is standard these days the platform reserves the rights to the content and can, at anytime, and for basically any reason, disappear your community and content. This has happened many times not just on discord but all big platforms, youtube, twitch, github etc. This speaks to a larger concept of content ownership. You should be setting an exceedingly secure root of information (self hosted, VERY limited access, backed up properly) and then use platforms as just that, platforms to broaden access to your content not the core of content itself.

Long story short.

If you want to have fun playing games with your friends, if you want a low effort community with disposable content, then by all means Discord is a great platform. But if you’re making or doing anything that you really care about, that you want others to partake in, that you want to be durable then please stop using Discord for that.