I'm not really convinced when people say that things like Discord or Slack are a good replacement for Twitter. "Angry about Twitter? Why not find a good Discord?" I keep hearing this, but no thanks.

This has nothing to do with Discord being bad, I use Discord and Slack to talk with a few groups of friends everyday, so I get the appeal, I just don't think those experiences are at all what I personally get from Twitter.

Twitter is amazing to me because it's a public place where everyone can come and talk about whatever they want. We tweet about politics and tech and food and literally every single niche you can imagine. I follow an assortment of friends, developers, comedians, reporters, and other random accounts to create a feed that's tuned just to my interests, and I know that anything I see on Twitter can be shared anywhere else as well. See a joke about product management that would kill at work? Share it in Slack. See an adorable meme? Put it in the family iMessage thread. Read a tweet that triggers an article here? Embed it on the blog.

As I wrote last week, I don't think Twitter is a "town square", but I do think that its public nature and wide array of users is a major part of its appeal. For what it's worth, YouTube, TikTok, Mastodon, Micro.blog, and Instagram are all pretty similar in this way as well.

But Discord and Slack are nothing like this. If I see something amazing in Slack, there's no way to share that message with anyone outside of that Slack workspace. And love it or hate the timeline, Twitter does a much better job of getting you caught up on the big posts of the day, while Discord and Slack become unusable when there's more than a few dozen people talking.

Like I said, I totally get the appeal of chatting in smaller places, I just don't think these are solving the same problems or delivering the same value as a service like Twitter.