If you primarily use Discord to build a community and provide support, answer questions and share information then PieFed is a great fit and here’s why:
PieFed has all the all the advantages that traditional forums have over Discord:
- Persistence – when someone asks a question or provides a reply it will stay there, visible, not get lost in the hubbub and scroll off the top of the screen, never to be seen again.
- The people with knowledge don’t need to be present 24/7 to make sure they’re available to help people when they ask for it, they can reply hours or days later.
- Every interaction builds up a publicly searchable corpus of information that search engines can index which increases the visibility of your community and product / service.
For a lot of communities, Discord was a really poor choice to begin with, made because of network effects and familiarity. The Discord vs forums debate has been had before so I won’t belabor this.
Besides forum-equivalent functionality, PieFed also offers these community building features:
- A wiki so the community (or just the moderators if you prefer) can build a reference resource that takes care of all the repetitive and obvious questions / issues people commonly have.
- Events for bringing people together at the same time. Events can have a physical location or an online meeting link.
- Question and answers similar to StackOverflow where an answer can be visually distinguished as an answer, and the original question marked as solved.
- PieFed is federated so your new PieFed server starts life as a member of a network of other communities. You can attract new people into your community and provide more to your existing community members. This is all under your control so you can federate as much or as little as you like. Operate PieFed completely standalone if you prefer!
- Private groups for sensitive topics or moderation coordination.
- Strong moderation features that help you identify bad actors and build a healthy community.
As of writing there are over 75 PieFed servers – you can migrate your Discord community to one of those or self host it on your own hardware.
When thinking about discord alternatives PieFed probably isn’t the first thing people come up with. After all, it has no video or voice chat and is not a chatroom. But I hope you can see that if you’re not leaning heavily on video/voice chat that PieFed is worth checking out. Have a browse of https://piefed.social and see what you think!