[flxy]

I remember when I first heard of discord back in 2015 before it became the huge thing it is these days. It seemed like a cool idea and reminded me of IRC, which I still used then, + voice chat if you needed it. Back then I had trouble getting my gaming friends on board as communication was split between Skype, Steam, TeamSpeak, the odd Mumble server, some IRC, etc. When people finally joined in and you were able to talk to most of them in one place, either via text or voice, it was great and made things a lot easier.

Nowadays though, I'm kind of weary of it. Their struggles to find a proper way of monetization makes me feel a bit uneasy at times to be quite honest. I would prefer to have a way to talk to my friends on a service that is either self-hosted, such as Matrix, or at least a little more transparent and trustworthy. But now it very hard to get people away from it and even if, it would probably create split groups again which would be a step backwards. They certainly did fill a niche of easy community building in a time when you would either have to set something up yourself, i.e. TeamSpeak, Mumble, Ventrillo, or rely on arguably worse services such as Skype. I guess it also helped that they looked towards Slack for some inspiration in a way. But there's still the issue that any of the open-source alternatives are arguable worse to this day, so a lot of people are stuck with it, sadly.