For gamers, Discord became a no-brainer after not much time. Click to create a server for some friends, send out some invites, and that's pretty much all you need. Built-in game overlay settings, voice chat, and screen sharing. Text and voice channels.
Compare this to the old TeamSpeak/Ventrilo/Mumble era, where you'd need to actually manage the installation, and tell people how to connect.
Discord makes it braindead-easy to get started, and the risks you're talking about affect less than 10% of the userbase, probably. Until a more-open platform provides a better experience, Discord will be here to stay among the masses.
Free dedicated voice chat with rich text chat. It was meant to take on Teamspeak, Ventrilo, Mumble etc. And it successfully did.
>or IRC if you're savvy
Totally different use case, not even comparable
Again, it's made for voice/screen/streaming share, not primarily text.
I'm in multiple text chat rooms on multiple servers in irc though.
May I counter that Discord effectively proprietarised the open standard that is IRC and then put all the bells and whistles such as shared screen streaming, voice chat etc on top? Similar to how WhatsApp proprietarised XMPP.
Even the niche Discord servers have managed to replicate the community feel of the early to mid 1990's IRC channels.
That's how I see it. You are welcome to disagree.
The fact it had text channels with (very, very limited) markup was less a ripoff of IRC and more "The basic thing everyone expects from a comms client, to have basic text channels where you can type words." It's literally the most fundamental thing a "communicator" can do is to have a text box that other users can look at. Otherwise you wouldn't even be able to organize people to get in voice channels! Sorry to say but nobody except nerds know what "IRC" is, but almost everyone understands online chat. This is not new. The fact IRC diehards think Discord "proprietized" IRC is a good example of not knowing or understanding your enemy at all and just romanticizing about what you think is important. Discord was not popular because of text chat. It was popular because of voice chat, and it did voice chat very well.
Every discussion of Discord has to have IRC contrarians who reminded you "it had text chat first", all while the fact of the matter is text chat isn't what made Discord popular to begin with!
> Even the niche Discord servers have managed to replicate the community feel of the early to mid 1990's IRC channels.
That isn't because IRC is some magical happy software that makes everybody using it sit in a circle and sing campfire songs. It's because what you are describing is the natural end-point of all online communication forums like Discord, IRC, AIM, or even Twitter or whatever: "community." What you are witnessing is a community of humans congregating, not some magical special sauce that IRC gave us in 1980 or whatever.
Community has existed in human society for a long time, in fact. Seeing it replicated in different mediums with similar features and form is not surprising at all. Your wording might imply IRC gave us this or something, or that the "communities" in Discord are rather ersatz in some way -- but I argue that's a simple confusion of cause and effect.
My point is that it is reductive to say "Discord is just IRC with some addons" when those addons are critical to its success. If Mumble had video-conference and screen sharing, it'd be pretty easy to convince my friends to use Mumble. Other than the network effect of Discord being the entry point to multiple servers/friend groups, and Discord makes spinning up your own server trivial.
So again, it does more than "just" improve on text chat.
> How do people feel ok taking such a big risk?
Well for most people they don't see the risks involved and those who are aware of the risks don't believe it will ever happen to them. Just look at Google accounts as an example. People use Gmail, get themselves locked out of them, and lose pretty much all their digital lives all the time but people still happily rely on Gmail.
Some quickly Googled stats about Gmail (take these number with a pinch of salt cause I've not looked into whats supporting these numbers - https://techjury.net/blog/gmail-statistics/ )
> Gmail remains the most popular email platform with over 1.8 billion users worldwide.
> As of April 2022, Gmail holds 29.5% of the email client market share.
> Gmail accounts for 27% of all email opens.
> 75% of all Gmail users access their email on mobile devices.
> 61% of 18-29-year-olds use Gmail.
You can be stubborn and rely on a platform your audience/community probably doesn’t want to use and have a very steep uphill battle to success. Or you can take a risk and rely on a platform you don’t own and have a (somewhat) less steep uphill battle to success.
If the platform is good enough and the benefits of using it are significant enough, people are going to take the risk. See: App Store development, selling on Amazon instead of your own e-commerce store, etc.
It is not that it is difficult to use a client (though the authentication i snot obvious - but then I had to think hard about Discord authentication/servers/invitations as well) but everyone is used to have a web interface and mobile clients to start with.
But there's definitely a lower barrier to entry with Discord right now, maybe forever. But maybe there just needs to be time to push through the network effect of discord. I'm vaguely optimistic, I'm seeing Matrix more and more often these days. Still in nerd circles, of course.
I only communicate on Matrix through a web interface.