Discord isn’t just for gamers. The popular text, voice, and video chat platform recently revamped its motto from “chat for gamers” to “chat for communities and friends.” In spite of the company’s marketing focus, Discord has been home to communities dedicated to Instagram meme pages, YouTube influencers, subreddits, podcasts, and more. In The Atlantic, Taylor Lorenz states that Discord gives “anyone with an audience” a way to engage with their following. In the shadow of these large, more well-known servers, though, regular teens have used Discord to create personal servers for chatting with their friends. Recently, non-gamers have begun to do the same.

“Your virtual hangout space accumulates a shared history, inside jokes, and a distinct yet flexible architecture.”

Although many messaging apps support multimedia, searching GIFs, and even games, Discord’s features bring a lot more flexibility to casual friend groups. You can set up custom emojis, bots, and user roles, all of which help create a sense of unique in-group on your server. Your virtual hangout space accumulates a shared history, inside jokes, and a distinct yet flexible architecture. Pinned messages mark milestones, and a sophisticated search feature instantly brings up messages with specific keywords or from certain channels, users, and date ranges. Channels organize your discourse into topics like #music, #debate, and #memes, like rooms within the broader house that is your server.

You can get creative and extend these features pretty far. On my friend Jamsheed’s server, there’s a person whose display name is “iq [negative number].” My friend developed a bot that reduces the number in the display name every time someone types “[name] is dumb” (the butt of the joke has consented)—an inside joke literally coded into the server’s functionality. When server members return home from college, they add the “Bay Area” role—a label with its own color, nametag, and sometimes even permissions—to their profile so they get pinged for scheduling meetups. When they’re not in the area, they remove that role to avoid irrelevant notifications. They pin funny messages and when they hit the per-channel limit of 50 pins, they archive the channel and create a new version. At this point, all their channels have multiple incarnations.

My friend’s server is an anomaly among casual Discord servers, though. It’s existed for four years and every member is Discord-savvy. People new to the platform can face a steep learning curve and feature overload. Rona, my co-author for this column, wanted to create a poll to ask what options people were considering for fall 2020. According to Google, it seemed like she needed a bot. It turns out that Discord’s convention is to post a message and ask people to react with different emojis. While the basics are intuitive on Discord, anything else, like playing music, can be non-obvious. It can be discouraging to find out that the task you want to accomplish demands installing and granting liberal permissions to mysterious bots whose creators are unknown.

Another source of confusion for new users is that display names are often not people’s real full names. This makes it difficult to meet and get to know strangers, like the friend of a friend, on the server. With so much available to customize, a server can grow complex over time. In a group chat, no matter how many members there are or how many messages they’ve sent, you see the same interface and amount of information. A worn-in Discord server might have dozens of roles to add, channels to discover, notifications to browse, and even rules to learn.

The hierarchy inherent to Discord servers can also create tension. Although you might simply want to upgrade your group chat, you have to abide by the stipulation that someone has to be the owner. When making a server, you might be unsure about how to name and run things without making the operation seem too self-centered. As the owner, you need everyone’s ongoing trust to prevent and resolve conflicts. Having additional moderators introduces another level of structure. Discord’s right-hand sidebar, which lists server members, places moderators above everyone else. This emphasizes power dynamics in a way that group chats, with their lack of built-in hierarchy, cannot.

“Personal Discord servers let you build full-fledged communities that grow with you.”

When it comes to Discord use cases, personal servers may not be the most popular or lucrative. However, they’ve long existed on the platform and even people outside Discord’s traditional demographic are getting involved. By creating a personal Discord server, my friend Jess now has a place where she can voice chat with her friends without having a proper reason to formally schedule calls. This fills a pandemic-induced gap in our social lives. The server includes people she knows from high school, summer camps, and college as well as friends of friends, allowing us members to meet people we wouldn’t have met otherwise. Perhaps, then, this is more than simply upgrading the group chat—while group chats tend to be static, personal Discord servers let you build full-fledged communities that grow with you.

Thanks to Jamsheed, Theo, and Jess for sharing their Discord experiences with me.

Upgrading the group chat: Discord breeds accord

Negative Space

Beginnings New and Old