this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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What are the others missing? In other words, what are the main features of discord that make it stand out so far above the rest?
I tried to move my friend group away from discord to stoat or matrix. But a pig part of why it stands out is that people are used to it and don't think privacy is a big enough reason to switch
Discoverability and moderated official servers
You need to be able to find say a public battlefield, minecraft, dayz, CivilizationVi, whatever community and subcommunities easily, so for minecraft you need to be able to find speedrunner, hardcore, smp, and so on groups
Active People to talk to
Chicken and egg problems. Gotta have signifcant quantities of people to attract more active people
Intuitive and easy joining, clean links.
Have to be able to say "oh we can hop on here and chat/discuss" to onboard new people from YouTube, Twitch, Owncast, whatever
The shared link cant be a string of letters and numbers because uninitiated correlate that with bad actors
This was something Guilded was starting to get right before they were bought out and shut down and it was massive for getting people to join
That's an absolute failure of all of those products to not provide that environment on their own.
This used to be commonplace
Discord at its best was simply a hangout where you and your friends can talk to each other without needing to be playing the same game.
It became entirely too complicated and bigger than it needed to be. It's a. Overblown IRC voice chat. And before nitro, it was exactly all it needed to be.
Now it shot itself in the foot like so many others by trying to be something that isn't what made it great
I think its yet to be seen if they shot themselves in the foot or not
Remember Reddit?
Yeah they were dirt bags and still exist just fine aren't they
I'd wager its more likely that the same scenario repeats than this being a catastrophic event for discord personally
Unfortunately
You are most likely correct that it's too early to say. I don't have a problem conceding that point to you.
I think Reddit did shoot itself in the foot though, regardless of if they are still around. I don't know that they will ever be able to regain what it has lost.
As a Reddit refugee myself I can say that for me they absolutely fucked over the chance to have me return to their platform, and many if not most of other refugees I'm guessing would share a similar opinion