>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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BowBun 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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forgotaccount3 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

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secabeen an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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.

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cheeseomlit 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

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cheikhcheikh 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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

	▲	gusgus01 10 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	AceyMan 3 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		obligatory citation: "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded." —Yogi Berra, MLB HOF catcher & manager

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w4rh4wk5 27 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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orwin 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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colordrops 15 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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scyzoryk_xyz 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.