Discord
Where most self-hosting and homelab project communities actually answer questions.
What it does
Discord is servers of topic channels with text, voice, video and screen sharing. Its relevance to a homelab is not social: a large share of open-source infrastructure projects — Home Assistant, Proxmox community spaces, Jellyfin, countless smaller tools — run their support in Discord rather than a forum or mailing list.
That makes it a documentation source, with the accompanying problem that answers are not indexed by search engines and are hard to find again.
Notes
- The app self-updates, so Homebrew’s version lags.
- Screen sharing needs Screen Recording permission.
- Nothing said in a Discord server is private from the server’s operators or Discord itself. Do not paste credentials or configuration containing them, which is a very common accident in support channels.
Alternative to
| Alternative | Type | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Slack | Freemium | The same shape for work; better threading, worse for large communities |
| Matrix with Element | Freemium | Open protocol, self-hostable, no single operator |
| Zulip | Freemium | Threaded by design, and much better for searchable support channels |
| Revolt | Freemium | An open-source Discord clone, small but functional |
Install
brew install --cask discord