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Re:How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017) by Saris on Tuesday August 24, 2021 @04:21PM (#28294460)
Everything else was/is much worse.

Even years later it's still the only platform I know of that combines text chat rooms, voice chat rooms, and video streaming into one place, all accessible from your 'server' as they call it.

It also has clients for many platforms, including a web client, all of which look and function the same.

Any alternative out there does one of those things decently well, but either completely lacks or is utterly awful at the other things.

Re:How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017) by tester756 on Tuesday August 24, 2021 @05:14PM (#28295087)
>combines text chat rooms, voice chat rooms, and video streaming into one place

and unlike skype (and probably teams too) supports PUSH 2 TALK which gaming oriented voice chats had close to 2 decades ago and is even more useful now, during WFH.

Re:How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017) by jsmith45 on Thursday August 26, 2021 @10:50AM (#28315681)
I think the most direct competitor to discord (for gaming and related communities) is guilded.gg which is basically a clone of discord that offers additional features as well, including offering most of the features that discord has paywalled behind "nitro" for free.

The big issue they have is building up a large enough network effect. I really can't see the discord communities I am a part of moving over there any time soon. Also, they were recently acquired by roblox, and nobody knows for sure what the new ownership will end up doing to the platform.