Personally, I wish the desktop client was a bit more lightweight. I understand why they went with Electron, and I don't think they could have afforded their speed of iterated development as a small company otherwise, but I still wish their app was a bit lighter on my laptop. I'm especially disappointed that cordless [1], a very usable third-party terminal-based client for Discord, was banned due to a ToS violation.

Secondly, I wish there was better support for E2E encryption, even just in direct messages. I wouldn't even mind it as a paid feature.

Not making the useage of third party clients a ToS violation.

Sometimes it feels like technology from the past was so bad that, given no alternatives, it interferes with the thing you're wanting to do (Skype/Internet Explorer). Those products can easily be subsumed by a competitor that is a superior product (Discord/Chrome).

But now it feels that because the options for those niches have been completely filled by those services, everyone becomes beholden to them, and in many cases there are undesirable aspects of the services that are not mutually exclusive with them being the most competent product on the market (inability to use Discord 3rd-party clients, Chrome's user tracking, Plex still showing you advertisements after buying a yearly subscription).

It feels like those products became too polished and attractive to users, if there exists a good reason to convince them to use something else, and even if we want to move off them, the network effect inevitably draws some of the holdouts back in (Messenger as a compromise for not using Facebook, sites that are incompatible with non-Chrome browsers). These products now have millions of active users whose behavior can be controlled or manipulated on a whim, for better or worse, if the company decides one day to make changes.

Now I'm starting to get the impression that succeeding in being the best solution in a given market is not necessarily a universal good. So many people were loathing how terrible Skype was for the longest time, and so Discord was founded. Yet, while the experience of participating a chat community is so much easier than in the past, I can't help but thing that so many people are now beholden to a new technological dependency.

What I have to wonder is: if money was not a factor in driving developer decisions, would Discord have allowed third party clients to be used? Preventing automated spam is not a problem unique to Discord.

Day to day the thing I dislike most about discord is that I can't have multiple instances of it open, or pop-out a channel to its own window. I'm in a bunch of servers but there are 3 channels and a DM in particular that I would love to just park on the second monitor forever and always have visible.

The only thing I would change is small and weird: I wish you could make the window smaller on desktop. The min-width is almost half the size of my screen; it shouldn't be hard to gracefully collapse things further as you resize

For me: per server avatars and/or usernames. Or even some sort of straight-up multi-account support. Being able to choose a display name upon joining a server, rather than after, would be a great start.

Their treatment of Linux is pretty terrible, where they block you from even launching the app after a minor update until you go download and install the new .deb file. I've had many times where I went to jump onto a quick Discord chat only to have to stop and jump through those hoops.

Mobile website. Back in the old day it was possible to join without registration. Just visit the project invite link and start typing. Then it required registration but still worked on mobile. Now it no longer works on mobile, you just get "install app or GTFO". I've stopped using discord then.

Tracking multiple threads of conversation in text. I'm not saying it needs Slack, HN or Reddit style threading, but some way to separate multiple topics of conversation that form within a channel.

Organization of multiple channels across multiple servers. Currently, I have 4 different servers, each with a different group of friends. But not every channel in each server is something that interests me. So I'd like to be able to reorganize them into channels to check whenever there are updates, channels to read occasionally, and channels to ignore entirely. But the channel organization is owned by the servers, and is therefore not something that I can re-organize on my side.

Not being able to choose a different avatar per server is a complete showstopper for many of my use cases (mixing gaming/work/personal personas in the same account): https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600293...

Honestly, in terms of features, not much. The biggest issue personally is that screen sharing on Linux with multiple monitors doesn't work well, but AFAIK that's a chromium thing. Another thing I'd really like is for twitch streams to be integrated with Discord streams. Otherwise, the main thing I'd want out of an alternative is privacy.

LaTeX support!