The rise (and future fall) of Discord (2024)

Thursday December 12, 2024

I want to talk about Discord. Not about all the issues like privacy, accessibility, performance. No, the good things. The part where it completely revolutionized the internet. And how it will destroy it all.

I can’t believe I’m feeling old

I was born in 2000¹. Many of the people reading this this are surely older and might scoff at this, but god damnit I’m 24 now and half the people I interact with on a regular basis are younger than me already, and I’m having existential crises about it.

I got into PC gaming for real in like 2011 thanks to Minecraft, which was Beta 1.6 at the time. We used Skype and Teamspeak to play it, the former of which corrupted a Minecraft world. A few years later I discovered Space Station 13, and I got involved in IRC channels for it.

I was for sure not the biggest IRC power user, but I still used it a lot and have fond memories of it. I remember that circa 2014-2015, the first thing I did whenever I got back from school was start HexChat. When I got my first smartphone I was literally sick in bed and the first thing I did was install an IRC client. This was all for SS13 communities, mostly just developing SS13. In January 2015, Space Station 14 effectively got open sourced. Dozens of developers from all SS13 communities got together in irc.rizon.net#spacebus to organize and get together. The project was dead a few months later, but still, I remember that.

I’m writing this blog in part because some of the people that will be reading this don’t know what IRC was like. There was no message history, conversation happen while your PC was off? Can’t see it easily. There was no image uploading or embeds. The UI, no matter what client you used, was spartan. You used a bot to send messages to people that were out, and it’d notify them when they came online again. You can’t easily talk with both your phone and PC at once. Etc. You have to manually register with every IRC server by messaging NickServ to reserve your name with a password, and then configure that into your IRC client.

And, of course, IRC was never mainstream, the only people using that were nerds willing to put up with it. Most regular SS13 server players weren’t bothering. It was never universal. The communities I interacted with were kind of fragmented: development in IRC and GitHub, players on a phpBB forum or an image board.

And then Discord came out. And it changed everything.

I’m going to give an example of the SS13 community I was active in at the time:

1. Some players make a Discord community for the server.
2. Us in IRC go “fine I’ll sign up but I doubt we’ll use it”.
3. IRC was dead a month or two later. Complete ghost town.

Discord was just that good.

What Discord brought to the internet

There have been dozens upon dozens of negative blog posts and articles written about Discord. And most are completely valid! The app runs like complete garbage, especially on my phone. Accessibility is so bad I’m willing to say the developers are outright intentionally ableist due to Gamer Stupidity². They’ll definitely enshittify it eventually, I’m under no delusions about that. And god would I be surprised if they didn’t have more shady business practices than you can possibly imagine. It’s an information black hole. And so on.

But no, I’m not writing about that. It’s not interesting, every fucking proprietary service does that. I’m writing about the side that nobody else seems to acknowledge about Discord. What it is.

Discord is not a simple chat app. It is not an IRC replacement. It is better than that. It is a community platform. 

The SS13 community I talked about moved to Discord. Now instead of one half-used forum and a focused image board, people could interact with a dozen or more channels about everything from “the game” to “not the game”. Off topic channels, video games. And relevant to me as a maintainer a lot, #code-map-sprite. Because, yeah, now every random player can just see what’s going on in the coder channel. This is incredible valuable.

This is, IMO, the biggest difference between IRC and Discord: Discord focuses on communities. On IRC, you joined a single channel, and like sure, your community could have multiple channels for different topics, but that always had so much friction, so not everybody was in every channel or even aware of the other channels. In Discord you join the entire community (“guild”, “server”, whatever). And sure, there’s probably channels you don’t care about, but it’s so much easier to be involved in the community as a whole, rather than just the topic of it.

And, of course, modern features like “message history”, “image embeds”, and “having your phone and PC connected at the same time” both made it so much better for collaboration as well as making it easier for people to casually participate. And if I was in as many “channels” on IRC as I am on Discord, my IRC client would be unusable. Discord has its UI issues, but god would I never in a million years ditch it for anything that currently exists.

Oh and it’s like, usable by non-nerds. So much more usable.

It saved Space Station 14

A quick recap of what happened with Space Station 14: It was originally developed closed-source. The developers got busy with their lives, development stalled, so in January 2015 they released the code as open source. Everybody from the SS13 development community had interest in developing it. And due to a variety of factors I won’t go into, the project was basically dead again soon after. Me and some friends picked it up again in ~May 2017, and now 7 years later it’s a real playable game with thousands of concurrent players.

Here’s my pet theory: It’s because of Discord that we had any chance.

Space Station 14 in 2015 was not a playable game. No, it was barely even a runnable game. By the end of the year, basically the entire SS13 community had given up on it as “yet another dead remake”. Sure, one or two people were slowly doing their best and chipping away at fixing some of the core engine features, but that doesn’t really matter. This is not a game that could’ve been built by one of two dedicated people until it was playable. This is a game that needs dozens of contributors, and how are you going to get those? There’s no website, there’s no blog, there’s no fancy progress images, it might as well be dead.

But it’s 2017. We have Discord. You just set up a bloody Discord for the project, shill it a little bit, and people can watch the work themselves. They’re already using the app anyways because it’s That Good, add another community onto the list and casually check into it. And it’s an active community of people I know and care about, people I can call friends. For the first 5 years of Space Station 14’s development we didn’t have a playable game, but Discord enabled us to have a community regardless. We had a channel just for posting messages of people going “Space Station 14 will never succeed”. We proved them all wrong.

I don’t have stats on this, but I suspect that even in the first month or two of the Discord’s existence, we had more people in it than the peak of #spacebus in 2015. The game was no more playable in May, or June, or July 2017 than in 2015, but you had like a dozen people regularly talking in the Discord regardless. And it never slowed.

We would have never succeeded if we tried this 2 years prior with IRC.

Where would we go?

I’m not stupid. Discord will die one day. It can’t not, for the whims of capitalism will eventually demand the service go to shit. What the fuck do we do then?

If Discord disappeared tomorrow, Space Station 14 would be immensely hurt. We have plenty of self-hosted infrastructure and we’d survive, but seriously hurt. We’d lose our community. Not just “the community" of the 33,000 semi-interested people in our Discord. No, my friends I regularly talk to. The means to that to them. The means to organize the project. The means to talk to dozens and dozens of regular contributors.

I’m not talking about the connections themselves. I could contact most of the people I care about through a variety of external services, I wouldn’t lose them entirely. But I’d definitely lose the ability to sit in VC comfortably every day and talk with them. How seamless it all was compared to what came before. And I’m technically inclined enough to be able to set up my own Mumble server if I really needed to.

We wouldn’t be hurt because we made a “mistake” relying on Discord. It’s not that Discord “replaced” a component that 10 years ago would be served by some self-hosted software. It filled a new void, one that is immensely valuable for communities in this decade. If you tear that out, what do you replace it with? It’d be obvious what the hole is now that it was once filled. What would you even move to? Discord didn’t replace forums through dirty business tactics, it replaced it because it was in many ways more convenient and better.

And everything I said applies to communities outside Space Station too. I’m in so many communities that would never have been conceived without Discord. Sure, you had the odd forum, but those did not compare to the activity and community that Discord now provides. 

The alternatives

“But PJB”, you might say, “what about Matrix”.

If you paid attention up above, you’ve already see me explain why Matrix failed this from day one. Matrix, too, focuses on channels instead of communities. I understand that Matrix apparently predated Discord so I can’t hold this as a mistake again them, but it’s still a problem. Sure it has a “communities" feature, but it’s basically a glorified channel search and minor UI organization; it feels more like an afterthought than what Discord has.

Matrix, of course, has plenty of other issues. The protocol is half broken. They spent years working on E2E only for “failed to decrypt message”, also lol. The homeserver is slow as molasses and they gave up on an alternative that isn’t god damn Python. Moderation tools are worse than Discord had in 2016, in fact it’s so bad to moderate that Libera IRC gave up on it. Good lord.

I’ve tried twice to have a Matrix community for Space Station 14. Once with bridging, once by self-hosting a home server. Both were half-broken nightmares, and not for a lack of me trying. Matrix either does not want to compete with Discord or they have shown themselves to be outright incapable of even realizing what it takes.

That last point is important. I’ve mentioned already there are tons of blog posts shitting on Discord, many by loud people in FOSS. And it’s surprisingly common for these people to unironically suggest IRC as an alternative in $current_year³. The fact they even list this as an option shows they have no idea what they are talking about, for the reasons I have outlined above. I feel like it shouldn’t need to be stated that if these people don’t understand what value Discord brings, they could never hope to compete with it. Not saying this directly applies to Matrix, but I do assert it applies to a lot of people that propose these alternatives, and it’s a common trend I’ve seen in FOSS in general.

I don’t know much about the alternatives to Matrix, the self-hostable ones like Rocket or Zulip. They’re not federated so they’re more like “self hostable Slack” than “federated Discord”, and “community platform” is not their primary goal. There’s of course many of the same frictions as forums too, like needing an account per community. Maybe they can have some success as modern replacements for forums, but I’m not entirely sold. 

There’s also ye olde forums, of course. They’re nice, but I think they might have unfixably fallen out of favor thanks to not really innovating in the past decade. “Modern” options like Discourse are mostly just a “modern” UI, and don’t change much about the fundamentals.

Forums don’t fully replace Discord. Like I said, it’s a new niche; Discord can replace forums on a somewhat functional level, but forums cannot hope do the inverse. You ever seen a forum with good voice chat? Yeah, didn’t think so. This is a fundamental mismatch I do not know how to solve.

As a Mastodon user I’m tempted to say that maybe all we need is “Matrix done right”, but maybe it’s not that easy. Hell, the Fediverse hasn’t exactly solved all its growing pains yet, so who knows.

This blog exists, in part, to have a personal alternative myself. I’ve found that I often end up repeating anything from arguments to infodumps in Discord, because it’s practically impossible to easily link to things I’ve said in the past. So hey, I’ll write things up in my blog, and then I can link back to it. This very blog post is an example of that! Many of these thoughts I’ve had for years but I’ve never had a good place to collect and easily link them. Of course, self-hosting a hand-crafted blog is not really a scalable solution to the rest of the internet.

So, what?

I don’t know.

If Discord dies today⁴, I do not believe the internet would go back to the IRC like 10 years ago. And they would not move to Matrix either. Currently, it seems that that hole left will have no way to be filled. Sure, another service would show up to replace Discord, probably… but that’s just another service that will show up and turn to shit 10 years later. In the best case scenario we might get a replacement like Bluesky that’s at least actively trying to prepare for their own inevitable demise, but whether Bluesky will succeed on that front is not a question anybody can answer today.

All the “Discord-only” communities that currently exist will likely disappear, however. And unlike all the dead phpBB forums that nobody uses anymore but are still up for now, dead Discord communities will never appear on the Wayback Machine. A decade or more of the internet’s history gone. Sure, you can’t easily google search the Wayback Machine, but at least it still exists somewhere. Discords? Truly lost forever. Entire hobby communities that spent years of work discussing things, answering questions, a wealth of information… gone.

The above scenario isn’t even fixable anymore. Even if everybody agrees, right now, to switch to non-Discord alternatives, the decade is still gone. The only thing we can hope to do from here is to make sure that when Discord dies, we don’t just have a worse replacement repeat the cycle. And I don’t see one being made right now.

Discord created the last 10 years of the internet. When Discord dies, it will kill them. Arguably, it already has. Will we sit here and let it kill the next 10, too?