2306: Happy Birthday, Discord

Back in the early days of “going online” — after the days of Bulletin Board Systems but before the widespread Internet we know today — our family used CompuServe to get at information online.

For a teenager like I was at the time, it was very exciting. For the first time, I was able to “meet” and communicate with people from all over the world, discuss common interests and even exchange files.

One of my favourite features of CompuServe was an area it rather grandiosely referred to as the “CB Simulator”, after the units used by ham radio operators to communicate with other enthusiasts over the radio waves. In reality, it was simply what we now know today as a chatroom, but it was a revelation to the young me, who had always had a bit of difficulty finding new people to talk to, particularly those who were into the same things.

In the CB Simulator, I could talk to people without fear of them, say, judging me for my appearance, or my mannerisms that clearly indicated I was uncomfortable with talking to strangers, or how I tended to go the colour of beetroot when talking to girls I liked. No; in the CB Simulator, I was able to communicate in the way I had always felt most comfortable: through the written word.

A few years later, when “the Internet” started to become more of a thing and self-contained, fenced-off communities like CompuServe and AOL were starting to become less of a thing, I looked into Internet Relay Chat, or IRC. There, I found a similar experience to that which I’d had in CompuServe’s CB Simulator: the ability to communicate and express myself through text to people from all over the world. And now, I could “emote” too, which in turn led to my first experiences with online roleplaying through a group that “simulated” Star Trek missions through text chat.

I was kind of sad when chatrooms fell out of favour with the rise of what we now know as social media, but for those of you, like me, who always used to enjoy the real-time nature of talking in chatrooms, may I introduce you to the wonderful service that is Discord, which is now celebrating its first birthday.

Originally designed as a free, lightweight alternative to Skype and Teamspeak, Discord has been actively developed over the last year to become one of the best — arguably the best — real-time chat application out there, particularly if you’re a gamer.

For the unfamiliar, it works in a slightly different way to instant messaging services such as Skype and its earlier counterparts AIM, MSN and Yahoo Messenger. Instead of focusing on private chats with individuals on your friends list, Discord is instead server-based, much like IRC was. Within that server — again like IRC — there are channels for whatever purposes the server admins desire. Anyone who is a member of that server — and servers can be public or private — can hop in to a channel and text chat. There’s voice chat facilities, too, which have very good, reliable, clear voice quality and connections, making it an ideal solution for “party chat” on PC, or even using alongside games that don’t normally offer voice communication: the Splatoon community, for example, use it quite a bit, since that game has no means of direct communication whatsoever.

Mostly the thing that excites me about Discord is how much it feels like those old IRC servers, only with a more modern coat of paint. Inline image posts, markdown formatting, animated GIFs and link previews are all a natural evolution of the purely text-based chat that IRC offered, and Discord’s cross-platform nature — it works via the Web, on PC or Mac desktop clients or even on mobile — makes it an ideal means for keeping in touch with groups of friends or specialised communities.

I’m very happy that Discord has been such a success since it originally launched, and hope it continues to be A Thing for many years to come yet. It’s been a great way for me to interact with friends from elsewhere on the Internet in new, more immediate ways than services like Twitter offer, and, depending on the server, it can be a nice quiet safe haven away from the noise of more public social media channels.

I’m a member of several different Discord servers, but the one on which I’m most active is probably the one I’m an admin of. If you’d like to stop by and say hi — the server is largely focused on video games, anime, lewds and general shitposting, but everyone there is just happy to have a good chinwag — then you can do so by following this link.

Happy birthday, Discord, and happy chatting to those of you who choose to come and join us!