Watch multiple streams at once with individual volume sliders (again, lag free).

Stream games live to anyone in the server with two clicks, also lag free (somehow).

Talk with as many friends as I want with high audio quality, virtually zero lag, for an unlimited amount of time.

Today Discord lets me do so much, and it's all free:

No, we'd probably end up talking over each other in a grainy, laggy Skype call that drops every five minutes. Ventrilo and Teamspeak worked, but setup was too complicated for my less tech-savvy friends and the mobile versions sucked. If I wanted to hang out online with the same friends 10 years ago, the options were either bad or unintuitive. The act of hopping into a voice channel and sharing what you're seeing is so quick, easy, and lag-free, it really does feel like we're all in the same room. No matter what we're up to, we're almost always sharing our screens. For hours every night we hang out, play games, and watch stuff together. I'm a member of a bunch of servers that I don't check in on very often, but lately, my Discord experience is a single server with close friends I've had since high school. Discord is also increasingly a reliable one-on-one instant messaging and telemeeting service complete with camera support, screen capture, and file sharing. Many have a mix of both or check in on a dozen servers per day. For a lot of us, servers are intimate spaces with no more than a dozen close friends. To some, a Discord server is a modern forum where hundreds or thousands of users gather under the interest of a single topic. Our server has a new music bot, Rythm, that's about as good as Groovy, but for how long?ĭiscord can be a lot of things to different people. The loss of Groovy reinforced an anxiety that I've been feeling for a long time: The Discord we have right now cannot and will not last forever. Broovy is still in our server, forever listening to 'Goodbye'.

Discord desktop site