I work on Revolt[1], which is an open-source chat platform very similar to Discord. I wonder if we should expect another huge influx soon...<p>[1]: <a href="https://revolt.chat" rel="nofollow">https://revolt.chat</a>
We use discord as a workplace chat platform that has allowed us to make great use of its converged “internal + external” structure. Basically, its works as both a team commons as well as a customer support and customer champion platform.<p>With everything it has provided for us there, I’m somewhere between shocked and flippant that discord hasn’t served our user category well or really at all. For example i’d love to have better tools to track customer support, measure user sentiment, promote the product to discord users, tie our premium features to discord statuses without using random bots and third parties, and so forth. And none of this needs to come at the expense of its free and open nature.<p>I still love discord, and I buy nitro for myself simply because we get so much value from the product that buying nitro for myself was “the least I could do”. But still. Huge missed opportunity.
If you'd like to delete your Discord messages en masse, I made an open-source tool for that [1]. It leverages a fairly undocumented process using your Discord data package, providing a UI to explore it and choose what to export. The tool gives you step-by-step instructions and a CSV file that Discord expects when you contact their privacy team. It works across all channels in both servers and DMs, even those you no longer have access to.<p>[1]: <a href="https://discorch.org" rel="nofollow">https://discorch.org</a>
I always find it interesting when Discord is always called a gaming chat platform (or sometimes video chat), when all but 3 servers, which I rarely use, are not about gaming, and only one ever uses video chat (our TTRPG group). Makes me wonder how vastly different the average Discord experience is from mine.<p>And as a tangent: I really wonder what I did to FT to get "Sorry, you have been blocked" for quite some time now.
Discord is an IdP and a hosting provider for voice/video/stream sharing.<p>Jitsi meet and mumble can do some of the services, but not for free and not as an IdP.<p>Also discord isn't encrypted E2E so I have to be honest, with AI analysis being what it will be soon, talking politics is honestly scary. No way the feds don't have hooks into it by now, esp. after that air force guy leaked secret data.
I hope the funds will enable them to finally invest in making users aware of what a great deal nitro is.<p>I get why Meta never acquired them (couldn’t) but I’m surprised Amazon and especially Valve never did.
I have to say that their monetisation so far has been excellent, at least from my point of view.<p>I don't believe they have paywalled any core features, only paywalled a few new features that are cosmetic only. If you don't pay for Discord Nitro or anything, you can still chat, call, join and use servers. The biggest advantage of Nitro is actually shared with everyone on your favorite server, and by 'boosting' the server you give features to everyone on it. I like that.<p>Is there any way that they could have monetised it better? I see it as pretty creative and user-friendly, given there's not many avenues to monetise a free service such as a chat.