Hi there! As an avid discord user (I use discord nearly constantly) I would be extremely disappointed if Rust switches to Discord.

The number one issue here is that Discord is 100% inaccessible, and the /r/blind team has been told it will stay that way.

For example, Discord has been rather rude to the /r/blind team, where /r/blind made a post on Discord’s subreddit asking if Discord will ever be accessible, and if not, they had custom clients that they could use. Discord responded by saying that using a custom client will get your account permanently banned from Discord and to contact them on Discord if they have more questions.

Discord has also said things to blind users like “get a better magnifier” and other things along that line. There has also been a support ticket open for (I think) about 4 years now asking for this, and there hasn’t been a single response from Discord.

Now, besides things like the above, there are other reasons I would prefer Rust doesn’t switch over to Discord. First off, the client is really terrible, with bugs nearly never getting fixed. The most often thing that will happen is Discord adds some half baked feature, makes a huge announcement for it, and then never fixes the bugs that come from it. Semi related is when a css change was pushed to the client without being checked, and it caused the “jump” buttons in the list of pinned messages to look completely wrong. It was about 24 hours before it was fixed.

Someone that would probably be less likely in the context of Rust, is the Discord community. From what I can tell since using Discord near constantly is that the majority of large communities on Discord is significantly more “toxic” than the ones on IRC or Slack. I’m not sure if something like this could come up for Rust, but it’s possible.

Discord also has a horrible terms of service. Custom css, custom clients, anything using your own Discord token, is completely forbidden, and will also get your account banned. On top of that, the API is horrible, with loads of inconsistencies and horrible documentation that is literally unreadable on mobile among other things.

I really really hope the Rust team(s) don’t decide to switch to Discord, it would ruin a lot of what I love about Rust for me.