A LibraryThing Discord?

Who would be interested in a non official LibraryThing discord?

Please delete if this is wrong group. I would delete it but I can't figure out how. Also posted on off topic where it should of been to begin with.:)

what is a library thing discord?

>2 majkia: ...said the majority of the LT userbase. ;-)

(Click... https://www.tomsguide.com/us/what-is-discord,review-5203.html )

I at least know what a Discord server is, and I might even poke my head in, but I expect this is not going to attract a terrible lot of interest. Who knows, though. I might be wrong...

>3 davidgn: Thanks for the info.

What would be the point for LT? I could be wrong, of course, but think the chattier booklovers are on Litsy.

Even if it becomes a fun place for LTers, I couldn't get any Discord server to work where I live the few times I've tried and doubt the next time will be any better until internet options improve here.

There's a LT subreddit and no one's posted to it in a year: https://www.reddit.com/r/Librarything/

I just figured it would be fun to be able to have a real time conversation about books during free times.

Sorry for the bother. Lol it was a silly idea.

I don't think it's a bad idea I just think it's tough to get buy-in. Like trying to get an alternative to Facebook.

This isn't a silly idea, just perhaps one that will bear out differently than you first thought.

>7 mellymel171328: Have you tried Litsy yet?

>10 aspirit: no but I plan too so I can help with donations next year.

If members want real-time chat, that would be fun. I'm not entirely sure it would work, though.

FWIW, Litsy is not real-time chat. It's more "Instagram with books." It's a very different thing, and experience. There's less conversation there than here, on Talk.

>12 timspalding: That's good to know. I'd seen talk in these forums of a "chat" function on Litsy but must have misinterpreted some part of that.

I've used discord enough to have some familiarity with it from a user perspective. My friends and I have used it since Skype quit working for us. I suspect that a few people will use it a lot but others not so much.

>14 WeeTurtle: I use it to play D&D :)

>12 timspalding: real time chat would be fun.

>15 mellymel171328: Same!

Where I imagine it would be useful would be in an event of sorts like a marathon cataloguing of a bookstore or local libraries where being able to chat in real time might be useful, especially if people aren't within speaking (or hearing) range.

You could always give it a try in an unofficial capacity, assuming that's alright with LT, and use a group to centralize information/FAQ about it.

Did anyone ever create a discord? I found this thread while googling for a LibraryThing discord... because I have questions.

>17 alsocass: Questions about Discord? or questions about LibraryThing? If it's the latter you can just ask them here in Talk.

Am I the only one so out of things that I thought the OP was elegantly asking about an argument on LT?

>19 susanbooks: Well, I do know about Discord because I use it for gaming, but I always think Whatsapp has something to do with Looney Tunes, and TikTok is a collective noun for a horological collection...

And instagram is a telegram delivered by teleportation, and twitter is someone who produces a twit, and facebook is that book Harry Potter finds in the forbidden section of the library in the first movie, or possibly the necronomicon from the first Evil Dead movie, and pinterist is somebody who specialises in pints...

I do have an account on Discord - I use it maybe once a year

An update on >5 aspirit: I currently can access Discord servers (without any idea what changed in my area.) I check in with several servers about once a month.

I use Discord constantly but I don't think I would use an LT server. There's already a forum here and I don't think the advantage of real-time conversation without having to refresh the page would outweigh the disadvantage of restricting the audience down to a couple dozen members.

>24 norabelle414:
Ditto.

>21 MrAndrew: So nice to learn from your simple, insightful explanations. Thank you.

>18 norabelle414: Questions about librarything. I am so used to jumping onto discord to chat quickly with someone in order to find an answer (everything from Minecraft to Research Software, they all have their own discord servers).

The forums are a bit overwhelming, I can't figure out how to find topic areas. Further, I begin by googling answers, but I have yet to find an actual answer to a question in the forum. Generally the post title will match, but the conversation will make no sense, often between people who have clearly been using the site for many years (ie. No basic answers).

But I will persist.

>27 alsocass: We have an FAQ group where you can post questions.

https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/625/Frequently-Asked-Questions

>27 alsocass: In addition to what >28 amanda4242: said, another good place is Welcome to LibraryThing! (https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/8033/Welcome-to-LibraryThing%21)

You can also ask your questions on this thread; since you've already said you are new people can be sure to give you basic answers.

Another good thing to know is that the "help" link in the upper corner is page-dependent, so if you are struggling with a particular page on LibraryThing (like the "add books" page), you can click that link and get taken to a help page for the specific page that you are on.

As a definite Old Internet Person (cf. Because Internet) I will admit that my association with Discord is "that gaming chat site full of what you would expect from gaming chat in terms of awful behavior toward individuals and groups that don't happen to fit the stereotypical idea of an online gamer". This is clearly no longer an accurate assessment. So what *is* it, on a scale from "old-school internet forum" to "group text"?

Would very much like a LT discord because I do most of my chatting about books on Discord and like all you people.

>30 lorax: Do you remember ICQ and/or MSN Messenger? Let's say Discord is like that, but each group is on a "server" (--maybe an actual dedicated server?--) and you don't have to know each member's user ID. You follow the server link once, then use it like an old chat room, either in a browser or (as so much is done today) in the Discord app, which saves all the links to the servers you've joined.

ETA: As far as I can tell, Discord is a popular way to avoid the whining gamer bros. Everyone on my servers has been friendly. Reading messages on a channel is much, much easier than scrolling through the crud in a typical Facebook feed, for example.

So it sounds to me a lot like Slack?

>33 lorax: It functions pretty much exactly the same as Slack but there are a wider range of slightly-less-private and fully public groups ("servers") you can join. I'm in a few servers of 10-20 friends who started out playing the same video game but now just chat with each other, and a few semi-public* servers for the hosts and fans of podcasts I listen to.

(*you have to click on a link on their website or newsletter or similar to join, you can't just open Discord and search for it)

>30 lorax: I'm on Discord for gaming, but as I joined via the Gaming Tavern server, I tend to associate with grognards of an indie bent. The whining we tend to get is GMs complaining their groups aren't interested in anything but wall-to-wall D&D.

We did get a few people of the Facebook type on the regular Gaming Tavern forum, but they quickly got squelched.

I like the idea the members of a group don't have to be using the group at the same time in order to have a conversation. That's a necessity when group members are spread around the globe.

>12 timspalding: FWIW, Litsy is not real-time chat. It's more "Instagram with books." It's a very different thing, and experience. There's less conversation there than here, on Talk.

Less conversation would have been my expectation from Litsy (though that could have been just me!). At the same time, there are lots of people I know who love the community there. I just can't get "into" a whole lot of chatting there. Hate typing on my tablet. Thought I might do better when the website was added, but I just have too many sites, so I don't take the time, I guess.

I am surprised that Discord remains so unknown. I have been trying to get my friends to switch to it for several years (we have group chats on FB, we tried what's app - ugh, and now twitter is trying Telegram - awful).

None of them have close to the functionality of Discord, yet it seems so overlooked.

>38 alsocass: It can be hard to get people to use a totally separate service for just one function. A lot of people already use FaceBook and Twitter, so it's less of a leap to get people to try those out. I certainly didn't join Discord until I had heard of several different servers I wanted to join.

>39 norabelle414:

To be clear, I am not arguing for it for Discord. Just responding to the general "what is Discord" conversation.

>38 alsocass:, 39 Yes, I am in a family Google Hangout. My brother keeps trying to get us to move over to Discord, but to me one of the perks of Hangouts is that if my e-mail is open, it is open.

>41 Stevil2001: that is how we all ended up stuck with FB as a primary communication tool. I hate it with a passion, but can't shake it.

One of the aspects of Discord I appreciate: no mega-corporation is openly scanning the messages and using the data for targeted marketing and data restrictions in email and on various websites to manipulate users' thoughts while contributing to billionaires' profits.

I know I'm in the minority for caring about Google and Facebook's normalized acts of evil, but... yeesh, no Hangouts or Facebook Messager for me, thanks. We still, fortunately, have better options.

>33 lorax: Discord, like Slack, is basically IRC with a more modern appearance and more limited file transfer capabilities. It even uses some of the same terminology: servers and channels. I know in the case of Slack, the IRC connection is quite literally true, but I don't know the particulars of the history of Discord.

>42 alsocass:
Fortunately no one in my family decided to descend into Facebook as a main channel of online communication. My publicist manages my Facebook author page, and I have no personal account.

>43 aspirit:
I'm not sure that the 21st-century apotheosis of 20th-century mind control (I.e. "media") technologies won't be the ruin of our whole civilization.

Can't ruin what's already broke!

I had made the post to just gauge an interest. I have always loved real time chat about subjects I love. I have a D&D group chat. A char about a bath bomb company. Even a Sailor Moon chat. I just thought it would be fun to have a book lovers chat. :)

I think the problem is less that Discord is unknown and more that people know the wrong things about it. I knew:

* It grew out of gaming chat. This has bad associations for me, as a non-gamer who's reasonably familiar with stuff like Gamergate, of harassment and misogyny etc.

* The name itself suggests conflict which plays into the above misconception.

Personally, real-time chat is the last thing I'm interested in - I want old-school forum-type conversation where you can have a thought that's more than a sentence long, and a conversation measured in days rather than minutes. Room for both approaches out there, of course!

>48 lorax: My experience with Discord (and slack), as it's actually used, is that it's a combination of a real-time chat and a forum. Unlike IRC, you can see messages that came when you weren't logged in, so it can actually be very much not real-time in practice - in slow rooms conversations will continue for weeks with one comment a day.

They also really encourage setting up many sub-rooms for topics (often entire categories of subrooms for related, fine-grained topics), by which means they have rediscovered a phpBB forum. (You could do that on IRC too, but it's much easier in slack/discord and everyone does it.) They even have threading if you want to continue very long rambly threads!

This isn't me defending discord, I find that running a forum on chat software does not work as well as running a forum on forum software (And frankly I miss the actually real-time realtime chat I used to get on IRC chats that have all turned into Discords), but they do often end up operating as much like a forum as a chat.

>49 melannen: I think you put that very well. :)

>48 lorax: I do get your point of view too. It really isn't for everyone. I just have always loved discord and was ignorant. I'm sorry.