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Comment by cheeseomlit | Hacker News Reader

>Most people use Discord for its community features and being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people

Do they? Personally I've never willingly joined one of those massive servers, only when forced to by some projects that refuse to host their content anywhere else- and its always a terrible experience. 99% of my discord usage is just a group chat with my IRL friends, so when looking for alternative I dont really care about roles and moderation and bots at all. I just want a group text chat, a mobile client for it with notifications, and drop-in/drop-out voice calls

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They have >200 million DAUs and guesses say they have >10K servers with >10K users. Assumptions from a tech crowd who were used to IRC should be taken with a grain of salt.

Now if we're just looking for alternatives for ourselves, cool. But I think the reality is that most normal users do fully lean into the social aspects of Discord. A server like Marvel Rivals has literally millions of users. Players join that discord to socialize with all of those players and build a community around the game.

I'm just questioning the 'most users' aspect- just anecdotally among my 'normal' peers those big servers dont seem like the most common use case. For every big million-user server there could be a million private 10-user servers

By definition it should obvious the million-user server is a popular feature since it has a million user.

Not necessarily, if Discord has more than 200 million Daily Active Users, and there are a few million-user servers. Those million-user servers could mostly be made up of the same million users (or only a small percentage still actively engage but they never left because there's no disincentive to leave servers instead of just muting them) meaning it's used by less than 1/200th of the total users of Discord.

Realistically, that's probably not the case, but it's impossible to know the true popularity without more statistics.

obligatory citation: "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded." —Yogi Berra, MLB HOF catcher & manager

> A server like Marvel Rivals has literally millions of users. Players join that discord to socialize with all of those players and build a community around the game.

Going back to something you said earlier:

> Rocket chat is a Slack alternative for people wanting to host a server for a community. It's not a platform, you need to register and login to each server manually.

So the primary thing is that there is no SSO for each server? No centralized auth system? Because everyone I know that uses discord 'found' the discord via some official means of those million person discord's like the official Marvel Rivals one. If the only purpose of the centralized system is not requiring a new login for every server, then a centralized auth system could be implemented by relying on people's other social media accounts. Login with Google/Facebook/Apple etc.

you could sign into A and your friend could sign into B using the single sign in, but you wouldn't be able to message each other is the problem, there is no platform bridging the logic gap, so you would both need to have A and B open. (afaik. didn't read about Rocket yet)

> A server like Marvel Rivals has literally millions of users. Players join that discord to socialize with all of those players and build a community around the game.

That is totally true, but is that server really going to be one with NSFW content or channels? Those huge servers are great spaces, but every one I've been on is fully functional if you are on a "teen account" without doing ID/Age verification.

I have said many times, Discord isn't just chat, it is 100% a social media app.

I think there's definitely more than 10 thousand servers... Unless they mean active? Even so... there's 3.2 million Discord servers with the Disboard bot installed, that's just Disboard, a way to advertise your Discord. There's likely millions more with no bots.

I think the gp is saying that out of those millions of total Discord servers, there are >10k of them that each have >10k users.

In other words there are >10k large servers, in addition to the much larger number of smaller servers.

> Do they? Personally I've never willingly joined one of those massive servers

Large community servers are plentiful. I'm in a few that are definitely several hundred if not a few thousand users. It's pretty common to have a public server for cities too.

The question was 1+ million people. Any alternative in the article but Signal could handle 100s or 1000s to my knowledge.

Multiple sources cite different totals but it does seem like there are multiple 1+ mil servers.

https://www.deepcord.com/leaderboard/top-members/all/all-siz...

The question was not are there Discord servers with 1+ million people. The question was do most Discord users use Discord to join servers with 1+ million people.

I don't join massive servers, but I use Discord almost exclusively with strangers.

All my IRL group chats are WhatsApp. Discord is for the local board game bar, various regional tabletop gaming scenes, my favorite basketball podcast, my favorite miniatures game, etc.

When I want to get into a community, these days I get a Discord link (which I guess I prefer to the Facebook Groups of a decade ago).

Any multiplayer game that doesn't have an integrated matchmaking have _big_ discord servers. Basically most paradox games, civ5 and civ6, probably others. All the organising that used to happen on forums now happens on discord servers

From personal experience, yes. Most of my friends are part of multiple large servers, often interacting with a small subsets of these communities. At this point, I don't think there is a comparable alternative.

My experience using discord for technical projects and communities is largely similar to IRC. I jump in, ask a question in the appropriate channel, someone answers quite quickly, i say thanks, I leave.

I’d prefer having openly searchable forums and chat archives and to use IRC but I can’t say the experience is that onerous.

"Discord alternatives aren't needed because I'm different from the majority of millions of people that use it differently than me."

nobody joins a million person discord, it's too crowded

Agreed 100%, can confirm same here. All true.

Not for most users who are blindly following their communities, seeking lock-in, tasteless design, eating rat poison, driving off cliffs so on and so forth.

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