This recent topic on what forums are “good for” (and a lot of similar, prior discussion in other spaces about the benefits of chat vs. forums) has me thinking again about whether this divide is intrinsic to these two modes of interacting. As modern chat platforms get more and more sophisticated with formatting (often markdown), emoji, reactions, profile links, etc., and forum platforms get sleeker designs, more responsive and quick interaction, etc., are these lines being blurred? What, exactly, fundamentally defines each mode?
Now Discourse is adding a real time chat plugin, based on the same core functionality as its forum “mode”, and able to interoperate with it (e.g. copy chat messages to a Topic for further discussion or archiving). So now real time chat and theoretically slower-paced forum discussion could happen in the same tool. What is the dividing line, and is it in some sense artificial? Could you in theory keep the forum functionality the same, and just make it possible to reply more quickly, effectively making a “chat”? And if so, could you simply provide different “views” of the same content, where “chat” is super stripped-down, Discord-like, with a focus on the content, and “forum” just expands all the optional info and tools? Or is there something else that truly, consistently defines a real difference?
Speaking of Discourse Chat, is anyone else excited by the prospect of at least good integration between these two modes? Do you actively prefer your chat to be separate (e.g. in Discord) - and if so, why - or is it just that way because no one has solved the integration problem well enough yet? If the latter, will you consider using Discourse with its integrated chat plugin as a future, more capable platform for community?
If you haven’t already done so and you use or are interested in using Discourse, I highly encourage you to test out the chat plugin! It’s pretty cool, and works really well already. Being able to move chat messages out of that more ephemeral space feels really powerful and conceptually helps me reduce the feeling of content loss in chat…