Seen some conversations recently about taking a general discussion thread here onto discord/matrix for “real time chat”.
It then struck me, as someone who’s been on lemmy since before the Reddit API migration … that lemmy used to be more “real time” than it is now with the front-end receiving updates over websockets.
Coupled with the “chat” sort for comments (which is buggy I think), you could turn any post into a live chat.
Obviously you wouldn’t want too many of these as they burden the backend. But it could be a nice feature, using mostly old lemmy tech (?), to allow selected posts to become “live chats”.
It would probably make sense to add time limits for how long this can be on for, and maybe to add limits for how many posts per community … all configurable by admins. But also it could make mega-threads and free-form discussions much more dynamic and attractive here.
EDIT:
There could be both user-specific and post-specific modes for this too.
Any particular user could be able to turn on chat mode for them, so that comments are flattened and updates happen automatically, but just for them. Limiting this in someway on a user based would make sense.
Then a particular post could be put into “chat mode”, such that everybody who opens the post does so in “chat mode” automatically, unless they opt out. Again, limitations on how many posts and for long they stay in “chat mode” make sense here.
Well, while live chat has its place, for sure, and the way discord creates spaces is quite cool I think …
… there’s a problem with how stuff just gets lost in the stream. That’s why there’s been a bit of pushback against the current tendancy to “chat as a substitute for documentation”. Forums, reddits and lemmys tend to be better structured and so better at retaining knowledge/information.
I don’t think you can use lemmy like a discord so I’m not sure anyone really is. But in the end, with all of this social media stuff … it’s all text messages with, I suspect, pretty minor UX/UI differences.
In this case, I think there’s a good amount of scope for lemmy to fill same space between reddit and discord. Instance local only communities have been added to code base (not shipped yet) and, apparently, private communities are coming too on top of that. If some sort of “chat mode” were to be added, that’d get you pretty close IMO.