Discord

Discord is a proprietary freeware VoIP application and digital distribution platform designed initially for the video gaming community, used by a variety of groups for chat and instant messaging, and bridged to the IndieWeb chat channels.

For the open source forum & discussion platform, see:

Discourse

How to

How to join

To join the community chat over Discord, please see the discuss page.

How to restrict direct messages

Discord allows several options for individual users to restrict direct messages:

Right click on the server name/icon
Select "Privacy Settings"
You can choose to disable direct messages or filter message requests from people you may not know

Advantages

The UI is easy to navigate.
Discord and its features are well documented (link?)

Criticism

Not A Good Alternative to Forums

2025-11-11 JA Westenberg (Discourse): The Death of Community Memory
2025-05-12 Luke Plunkett (Aftermath): One Last Time, Discord Is Not A Suitable Replacement For Forums
2023-05-01 Luke Plunkett (Kotaku): Stop. Closing. Forums. For. Discord.

What Discord is not good at, however, is being a long-term repository of information, the kind of place you can ask a question, get an answer then have that answer remain easily accessible for months, years or even decades to come.

2022-07-27 @janaboruta: a Discord server is not "community building" (archived)

And spinning up a @discord server does not = community building. That’s one program out of many needed to engage with your community, yet it seems to be the default these days. I’m curious how many Slack orgs and Discord servers are you in currently? New blog post idea brewing.

2021-09-15 Luke Plunkett (Kotaku): Please Stop Closing Forums And Moving People To Discord

Privacy Concerns

In response to a new global policy where “users may be required to engage in an age-verification process”, as announced: 2026-02-09 Discord Launches Teen-by-Default Settings Globally (archived) concerns were raised about privacy. Especially as Discord was breached for thousands of photo ID scans just a few months prior.

Discord clarified their policy to alleviate some of the concerns by updating the blog post 2026-02-10 (new archived) and cross-posting this to X: 2026-02-10 “We’ve seen some questions about our age assurance update […]” (archived).

2026-02-09 Luke Plunkett (for Aftermath): Discord Leadership Only People On Planet Who Think Adding Age Verification To Discord A Good Idea
2025-10-03 Jay Peters (for The Verge): Discord customer service data breach leaks user info and scanned photo IDs (archived)
2025-10-09 Osmond Chia (for BBC): ID photos of 70,000 users may have been leaked, Discord says
2026-02-09 Ashley Belanger (for Ars Technica): Discord faces backlash over age checks after data breach exposed 70,000 IDs (archived)
2026-02-09 Stevie Bonifield (for The Verge): Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month (archived):
It’s not just teens trying to cheat the system who might attempt to dodge age checks. Adult users could avoid verifying, as well, due to concerns around data privacy, particularly if they don’t want to use an ID to verify their age. In October, one of Discord’s former third-party vendors suffered a data breach that exposed users’ age verification data, including images of government IDs.

Notification Heavy

2025-02-04 Joe Crawford: very noisy

Discord remains mostly unpleasant for me to use but I'm learning to get better at it. It is very "noisy" as an interface for me. It's too similar to standing in the middle of Times Square or being in a room full of Slot Machines. But again, I'm working with it.

How to avoid getting spammed with @-everyone and @-here on a Discord server: Right click on the server icon > Notification settings > check "suppress @.everyone and @.here"

Closed Off

2022-07-06 Chris DeLeon: If you want a picture of the future of internet search, imagine a link which says the answer is on the discord and the link takes you to this (login wall) (archived)
It's not self-hostable
Although it contributes to open source the product is not open source.
Discord API and chat gateway is proprietary. This means that integration developers (i.e. people making bots) are beholden to implementing interfaces that work with Discord's specific API.
Content stored on discord is stuck in a silo, hidden from the rest of the web, and therefore not possible to index, search or archive.
Discord has no built-in data export tool, and using the API for archiving data is against the TOS [1]
Discord bans users who use third-party clients.

Cryptocurrency

2021-11-11 Clara Molot (Bloomberg): Discord App Backtracks on Crypto Tool After Backlash From Users