What is Discord?

What Discord is

Discord is a voice, video, and text chat platform used by gaming and online communities. Many communities already live on Discord, so bots and integrations meet players where they are.

Discord was founded by Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy and launched in 2015. It was made for people who play games together and wanted voice chat that was easy to set up and did not slow down their games. It spread quickly through gaming communities.

Over time, study groups, hobby clubs, open source projects and businesses started using it too. In 2020 Discord changed its branding to present itself as a place for all kinds of communities, not only gaming. It has since added features such as threads, forum channels, slash commands and apps that run inside the client.

How Discord works

Discord is organized into servers. A server is a community space that anyone can create for free. Inside a server there are channels. Text channels are for written messages, voice channels are for talking and sharing your screen, and forum channels are for topics with their own replies. People join a server through an invite link.

Roles control what members can do. A role is a label such as Moderator or Member, with a set of permissions attached. Server owners use roles to decide who can see a channel, post in it, or manage other members. Direct messages let people talk privately outside any server.

Developers can extend Discord with bots, which Discord also calls apps. A bot is a program that connects to Discord through its API and reacts to events, such as a new member joining or someone using a slash command. Bots are often written with libraries such as discord.js for JavaScript or discord.py for Python. A simpler tool is the webhook, which is a special URL that lets another service post messages into a channel.

Key features of Discord

• Servers and channels

  Each community gets its own server, split into text, voice and forum channels by topic.

• Voice and video

  Voice channels stay open so people can drop in and out. Video calls and screen sharing are built in.

• Roles and permissions

  Fine control over who can read, write and manage each channel.

• Bots and apps

  A public API lets developers build bots for moderation, games, alerts and custom commands.

• Webhooks

  A simple way for outside services to post messages into a channel, such as build results or game server alerts.

• Threads and forums

  Side conversations can be kept in threads, and forum channels keep questions and topics organized.

When to use Discord

Discord compared with alternatives

How to start learning Discord

1. 01Create a free account at discord.com and make your own test server.
2. 02Add a few text and voice channels, create two roles and try out the permission settings.
3. 03Create a webhook in a channel and send a test message to it to see how integrations work.
4. 04Read the official Discord Developer Documentation and register an app in the Developer Portal.
5. 05Build a small bot with discord.js or discord.py that answers one slash command, and run it on your own computer.

What Discord costs

Discord is free to use, including creating servers and using voice chat. A paid subscription called Nitro adds extras such as larger uploads and cosmetic perks, and servers can be boosted for added perks. The bot API is free, but you pay for wherever you host your bot.

How DATAL Projects uses Discord

Discord is part of our discord & game server setup work in the Philippines. Common uses:

• Discord bots
• Linking game servers to Discord
• Community alerts and moderation tools

Common questions about Discord