[jakebasile]

I'm continually impressed with Discord and their technical blogs contribute to my respect for them. I use it in both my personal life (I run a small server for online friends, plus large game centric servers) and my professional life (instead of Slack). It's a delight to use, the voice chat is extremely high quality, text chat is fast and searchable, and notifications actually work. Discord has become the de facto place for many gaming communities to organize which is a big deal considering how discriminating and exacting PC gamers can be.

My only concern is their long term viability and I don't just mean money wise. I'm concerned they'll have to sacrifice the user experience to either achieve sustainability or consent to a buyout by a larger company that only wants the users and brand. I hope I'm wrong, and I bought a year of Nitro to do my part.

[lordCarbonFiber]

A closed source walled garden chat service that survives purely on the free flow of VC capital 100% has no long term viability. No federation means as soon as the "next thing" shows up and wins way the VC dollars they'll disappear. It's so incredibly frusterating that so many companies and users make/support these closed environments even as we enter a new golden age of open sourced and federated technologies.

[jakebasile]

If there was an open source and federated equivalent to the features Discord provides I'd use it. There is no such product. Matrix is interesting, but the experience is no where near as polished as Discord and friends and that matters for mass adoption.

[aphextron]

>If there was an open source and federated equivalent to the features Discord provides I'd use it.

But will you pay for Discord though? The features and quality Discord is able to provide are artificially propped up by VC funding. When it runs dry, we will be left with open source offerings, or the next product to take it's place and repeat the cycle.

[connorcpu]

I already pay $5/mo for Discord. Animated avatars and cross-server custom emoji were enough to entice me

[mahyarm]

I would if they made the corporate / generic edition ;) It's better than slack

[Arathorn]

We are working as hard as we can on polishing Matrix. Making it mass user friendly is simply our #1 priority. Folks can help directly (beyond PRs, bug reports and feature requests) by donating at https://patreon.com/matrixdotorg.

[andruby]

Maybe Matrix can learn from Discord's technology choices? :)

[mahyarm]

They could side step to corporate slack on-prem chat style solutions and be a pretty strong contender. They were scaling huge chat rooms and such way better than slack was a year ago.

But they seem to refuse suggestions to do so continuously, so they seem to have some business plan somewhere.

[tmat]

I discussed moving my companies chat to discord because its a better experience than Slack in every way. They wouldn't go for it because it's marketing is so gamer oriented and wouldn't look professional when we invite clients onboard :(

[andruby]

I have the same problem. It would be great if they released the same product without the gaming brand. I would use that for all my personal and professional chats.

[weixiyen]

Slack has great UI but the app just feels sluggish compared to Discord, esp initial load times.

[ben_jones]

The real concern should be an acquisition by a large tech company. Reminds me of Microsoft buying Skype. A lot of enterprise companies could be interested in selling discord to their corporate clients...