What is Discord

Discord is an American VoIP, instant messaging and digital distribution platform designed for creating communities. Users communicate with voice calls, video calls, text messaging, media and files in private chats or as part of communities called "servers." Servers are a collection of persistent chat rooms and voice chat channels. Discord runs on Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, iPadOS, Linux, and in web browsers. As of July 21, 2019, there are over 250 million users of the software.

What are Servers?
Discord communities are organized into discrete collections of channels called servers. Users can create servers for free, manage their public visibility and create both channels and channel categories up to 250.

Starting October 2017, Discord allows game developers and publishers to verify their servers. Verified servers, like verified accounts on social media sites, have badges to mark them as official communities. A verified server is moderated by its developer's or publisher's own moderation team. Verification was later extended in February 2018 to include esports teams and musical artists.

By the end of 2017, about 450 servers were verified.

Members can help servers obtain perks in 3 levels via the "Server Boost" feature, which unlocks higher quality voice channels, more emoji slots, and other perks. Users can buy boosts for servers for $4.99 a month. "Discord Nitro" subscribers get two boosts, and 30% off boosts.

In 2020 Discord unveiled a new feature, known as "Community servers". It includes such features like a custom welcome screen, server insights, and the ability to advertise on Discord's Server Discovery page.

Channels
Channels may be either used for voice chat and streaming or for instant messaging and file sharing. The visibility and access to channels can be customized to limit access from certain users, for example, marking a channel "NSFW" (Not Safe For Work) requires that first-time viewers confirm they are over 18 years old and willing to see such content.

Text channels support some rich text via a subset of the Markdown syntax. Code blocks with language-specific highlighting can also be used.

Direct messages
Direct messages in Discord work just like in any other communication platform. They allow people to text, share files, live stream and call others privately outside of servers. An added feature in Discord direct messages is the ability to create message groups of up to 10 users. This acts similar to a server's text channel but it comes with one major difference i.e. You can initiate a call simultaneously for all the members in a direct message group (in servers, people can only join voice channels but cannot be called into)

User profiles
Users register for Discord with an email address and must create a username. To allow multiple users to use the same username, they are assigned a four-digit number called a "discriminator", prefixed with "#", which is added to the end of their username.

Both at the server and the user level, Discord allows users to connect these to their Twitch or other gaming service account.

Users can assign a profile picture and subscribers for Discord Nitro, part of Discord's monetization plan, can use animated profile pictures.

Video calls and streaming
Video calling and screen sharing were added in October 2017, allowing users to create private video calls with up to 10 users, later increased to 40 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In August 2019, this was expanded with live streaming channels in servers. A user can share their screen if Discord has detected they are playing a game and others in that channel can join the channel to watch the stream. While these features mimic live streaming capabilities of platforms like Twitch, the company does not plan to compete with these services, believing that these features are best used by small groups.