I just got excited about a new exercise and wanted to geek out about it with others, but it didn’t really seem significant enough for a whole forum post. There’s a post about Discourse Chat (In Beta) but it looks like it isn’t in place.
I searched around for a Discord server and couldn’t find anything, so I set something unofficial up for anybody who wants to hang out.
If there’s already one set up, let me know and I’ll remove this!
@FoohonPie Nice. Thanks. I think there are a few unofficial ones about, but…
I’ve been toying with making an official Discord server for a little while.
What does everyone think about us doing it? I’m thinking it would be strictly a social, chatting, celebratory space, rather than a support or discussion space (those things should be kept to to the forum where deeper async conversation and future back-reference can happen I think)
I am generally pro an official discord server. It may just be me, but quite often I prefer discord over forums. Sure forums do somethings better but discord has sorta been approaching forums and have some features in that direction.
I also would like to have something with some more instant feedback. Especially for the small things. Like “why isn’t this elixir line doing what I expect?” or “is someone here to look at this small pull request?”.
I think the chat over at https://www.codingame.com/ is pretty neat. Everyone on the website is automatically put into the main channel and that way there is always someone to talk to. But that might be a bit much or even too distracting for exercism.
I haved wished for this Discourse Chat at least once.
I’d love that. It could be a great way to hang out with the community a bit more and maybe play some games together.
Voice chats could also be great for students and mentors to talk to each other in a more informal way.
That sounds good to me! Note, there’s an official IRC channel on Libera Chat.
My first thought was “God I’m in too many Discords already”. In one of them I was just appointed emergency staff because the owner is having a mental health crisis after moderating it for over a year without a break.
While I tend to prefer more asynchronous communication, I’ve often missed something like what the #chat Slack channel was, to talk about random topics.
But the real benefit would be the opportunity to do more group video/voice chat stuff. Like the live streams but more interactive!
Also, then we could also use it for the community calls 
OK. So would be people happy to have two rooms: social and support. Everything else (discussions on improvements, feature requests, bugs, etc) should go on the forum?
If, so I’ll speak to @jonathanmiddleton about it on Monday and we’ll get it actioned.
It seems there’s a limit of 25 people for video calls. Do you know if that can be either extended, or if you can do 25 video + unlimited non-video?
There is a limit to how many to be in a video call of 25. And unlimited without video, although I think there is no limit on screen sharing, but you can only watch 1 screen share at a time, if I can recall. Perhaps 1/25 of my calls are video calls on discord, and most of them are just audio
Can you do 25 video + unlimited non video on one call?
Pretty sure you can’t
There is a possibility there can be more people in the call, but there is at least as far as I understand a cap of 25 people who can see the video streams.
Right, Discord created.
I don’t massively know what I’m doing with Discord, so I’m very open to advice. I’ve created a #setting-up channel that y’all can use to tell me all the newbie things I’ve got wrong. I’ll delete it before we push this more publically.
So for now, I’ll sneak this link here while we get set up: Exercism
Come and join me! 
As of 2021, the service [Discord] has over 350 million registered users and over 150 million monthly active users.
Not everyone like Discord, but it has a pretty massive user base. There are certainly people who will refuse any given platform. Exercism provides two platforms to give users options: Discord and this forum (Discourse).
There are certainly people who will refuse any given platform
Yep. Lots of people hate Discord. Lots of people hated Slack. Lots of people hate this forum. Its impossible to please everyone sadly. So we choose the things that the cost us the least and that majority of people can interact with without learning something new.
Element.io costs $10 per user/month (paid annually). This would therefore cost us an immediate $50,000 payment, which is over 25% of our annual costs. Whereas Discord is free. Any self-hosted solution would involve extra costs too.
And as Isaac says, with Discord having 150 active million users, we’re asking the majority of our users to use something they already have an account with, rather than having to download and use new software (I’ve never used Element.io as a use case :))
