[sph]

> Discord is an interesting one, as I think they're optimising for communities

Are they? It seems to me, with their desperate focus on monetisation and gaming (didn't they try to build their app store?) that all their focus is to optimise for "engagement" and keep "gamers" using their platform 24/7

Discord has become like many companies in the space a behemoth that has conquered a niche with a decent product and now are looking to extract as much revenue from each free user. What is the last genuinely killer or novel feature that Discord has released? How are they trying to make online communities better? They are just making their silo prettier and hoping you are interested in animated emojis to make bank.

Companies like Discord are lucky open-source projects do not have any high-level coordination, but operate like headless chickens, because Discord isn't doing anything that is technologically ground breaking by any stretch and are around "solely" because of network effects.

[danpalmer]

I guess I'm trying to give them a charitable viewpoint. Discord is far more community focused than, say, Slack. You're right that they do seem to be going all in on monetisation now, but I see that less on the few open source project Discord servers I'm on.

[ksynwa]

> They are just making their silo prettier and hoping you are interested in animated emojis to make bank.

You can now buy animated frames for your profile picture for 10 USD.

[bsder]

> Discord isn't doing anything that is technologically ground breaking by any stretch and are around "solely" because of network effects.

Discord is handling identity management and anti-spam. Both of those are a gigantic PITA.

Until open source gets a good answer for both of those problems, the federated solutions will always be also-rans.