[kortilla]

Discord hasn’t solved it anymore than slack, iMessage, teams, etc. The experience is more polished but it doesn’t do anything fundamentally special.

If discord shutdown tomorrow my friends would be annoyed and would just move to some other similar group chat + audio.

The value is entirely in the user base. I wouldn’t be on it if nobody was there.

> Really? How did you come to this conclusion?

Because that’s how every social network works. Here’s a thought exercise. Do you think Microsoft would offer $10B to buy Discord if they weren’t allowed to transfer over any of the existing accounts?

If it’s $10B worth of just software engineering, then that’s an easy “yes”. The realistic answer though is “no” because Discord is useless without the user-base.

[saalweachter]

Do chat apps lock in users for long?

My online circle has been on Discord for a couple of years, but they've migrated from IRC to Campfire to Hangouts (or whatever it was at the time) to Slack to Discord with maybe a few stops in between. Maybe Discord is finally perfect and we'll never move again ... but moving a community from one chat venue to another has been pretty easy so far.

[bluecalm]

Try following some projects on Discord. Maybe a small one like Leela Chess Zero. It's a completely different experience than Slack. Maybe you and your friends could be happy there but for projects with hundred/thousands of fans/developers/contributors it's in league of its own. It got it users because of it. It didn't luckily stumble into a userbase. If it disappeared today people would be sad and switch to something else if it would reappear in 2 years everyone would be switching back ASAP.