Discord is pretty much the opposite,” she said. But, she said, “Slack is for you to be productive at work. “It’s basically a free and easy way to have a Slack with your community,” she said. Sara Dietschy, a YouTuber with nearly half a million subscribers, set up a Discord server for her fans six months ago after she noticed other YouTube stars offering them.

More than 200 million people use the service. YouTube A-listers such as Philip DeFranco, Grace Helbig, and the Try Guys all have their own servers, and subreddits such as those dedicated to discussing The Bachelor and The Real Housewives have their own Discord groups too. Last March, Ninja, one of the most popular video-game live-streamers in the world, taught Drake how to use Discord while playing Fortnite. It’s like having an AIM buddy list at the top of the app. You can add friends from any server to have a one-on-one conversation, without having to click into each server itself.

In addition to the group chats, Discord allows for global private messaging. Most server administrators designate roles to help moderate their communities. Not only can servers have public and private channels, but administrators can also designate an endless series of roles to each user, all of which can come with custom privileges, colors, and name tags. Visually, Discord looks very similar to Slack.ĭiscord is also highly customizable. Some channels are text-based, and some are group voice chats. Once you’re within a server, you can hop between a long list of hashtag-marked channels on the left-hand side of the screen. Each server functions as its own community, and it’s very easy to toggle between them. But over the past year, it has outgrown its origin story and become the default place where influencers, YouTubers, Instagram meme accounts, and anyone with an audience can connect with their community.Īfter signing up for Discord, users join different servers. A commenter touted a dog-lover Discord server.ĭiscord is a real-time chat platform that was founded four years ago as a way to make it easier for gamers to communicate. Another urged me to connect with a group of like-minded reptile lovers on Discord. “Join our bird-themed Discord community!” one posted. Over the past few months, seemingly all the pet- and animal-themed Instagram accounts I follow have begun interspersing their videos with pleas.