What Is Discord and How Do You Use It?

Video games and the internet go together like Doritos and Mountain Dew. With online play, you don’t need to seek an arcade’s bustling crowds or wrangle friends together for couch gaming. You can enjoy cooperating with, or competing against, people from across the globe.

Granted, online multiplayer play isn’t always a pleasant experience, especially when it comes to communication. Listening to random, faraway strangers screech obscenities at you can be enough to make you want to burn your gaming headset. However, conducting epic MMO raids or coordinating shooter tactics with teammates wasn’t possible in the era before online chat. And today, Discord is the service that people turn to for online gaming chat.

What Is Discord?

With over a quarter of a billion users, Discord is one of the most popular ways that gamers communicate online. Discord lets friends chat via voice, video, or text, and join servers where larger communities gather.

Gaming is Discord’s focus. At one point, the service gave away free PC games to paid subscribers before realizing it couldn’t beat Steam. However, any online community can take advantage of the features Discord offers. More on its other uses in a bit. 

How to Join Discord

There are many ways to communicate while gaming online, but many of them are tied to specific hardware. Discord succeeds because it’s platform agnostic. You can integrate it with your PlayStation or Xbox account, for example. However, Discord is not locked down to any one system, unlike Xbox Live and PlayStation Network. Not being tethered to a game console also strengthens Discord’s argument for non-gaming uses such as talking to family or classmates.

Joining Discord is as easy as using the service on your desktop browser or downloading the free app available for Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. From there, you join a server by searching for one, accepting an invite, or creating your own. A server is made up of channels that members use for communication. In fact, Discord’s video chat feature makes it a fine alternative to Zoom Meetings.

Servers (and channels within those servers) appear on the left rail; the list of server members appears on the right. At the top (or on the bottom on mobile) you can add and message friends, search servers, and see if you’ve been mentioned in a conversation. A single, free user can join up to 100 servers, while a paid subscriber can join 200.

In addition, Discord lets you customize server notifications, and give yourself a different nickname for each joined server. You can also invite friends you added from one server into another, even though friends don’t need to share a server to communicate.

A single server can have up to 500,000 members (250,000 on a new server). That said, the owner must contact Discord support for more server space to avoid connection errors if more than 25,000 people are simultaneously online. A server maxes out at 50 categories and 500 channels.

How to Use Discord

You use Discord alongside whatever other activity you’re doing. Say you have a group of friends you play fighting games with on weekends. You can all seamlessly connect to the same Discord server by launching and accessing it from any device. Hop from smacking talking each other’s Street Fighter 6 skills on PlayStation 5 to cackling about the fatalities in Mortal Kombat 11 on Xbox Series X. A game’s crossplay functionality lets people compete regardless of their console, so Discord is perfect in that scenario. Discord is a particularly stellar alternative to Nintendo Switch Online’s subpar voice chat app.

Discord offers both private and public servers. Private servers are for hanging out with cool friends, not strangers itching to scream at you. They also work for any kind of communication that requires secrecy. For certain game previews, I watched a presentation and asked the developers questions through a private, password-protected Discord server.

Public servers also have their place. Like a mixture of Reddit and Slack, public Discord servers are for fans of a common subject to all chat with each other and foster their community. You can create custom emotes for your server’s in-jokes. Moderators can ban problematic users. In fact, game developers are known for interacting with users on verified Discord servers dedicated to their titles. 

Although it has video features, Discord doesn’t compete with Twitch and other video game live streaming platforms. Instead, Discord is more of a complementary service to Twitch. While watching your favorite streamer, you can interact with other fans in the Discord channel. In 2018, when Drake and Ninja inexplicably teamed up to play Fortnite on Twitch, they used Discord to communicate. Streamers can even reward their fans who sync Discord with their Patreon, Twitch, or YouTube accounts with continued access to their servers as long as those fans stay subscribed. You can use Discord to stream Jackbox games with your friends.

Discord Isn’t Just for Gamers

Discord is also leaning harder on non-gaming uses. The website advertises communities for book clubs, dance classes, and digital conventions. Discord has told us that, according to internal polls, teenagers use Discord for everything from studying for classes to watching Netflix together. You can connect Spotify music streaming to your Discord account, so friends can see what you’re listening to.

Does Discord Cost Money?

Discord is free to download and you can use it just fine without ever paying. However, Discord users can enjoy premium extras with Discord Nitro, which is available in two tiers. 

Discord Nitro Basic is the cheaper premium tier that costs $3 per month or $30 per year. This subscription grants you a Nitro badge for your profile, custom emotes and stickers you can use beyond your home server, and custom video backgrounds.

For $10 per month or $100 per year, the standard Discord Nitro tier offers everything in Discord Nitro Basic, plus a few more perks. You can upload files up to 500MB, which is 10 times Nitro Basic’s 50MB limit (and way greater than the 8MB limit for free users). Using it, you can stream at 4K/60fps, write longer messages, and spruce up your custom server profiles with animated avatars, banners, and extra colors.

You also get two Server Boosts. When a server gets boosted enough times, it levels up and unlocks more features for all members of that server. These bonuses include more emoji slots, a vanity URL, custom invite artwork, animated icons, a server banner, and features otherwise reserved for paid members, such as improved video quality and higher upload limits. So, even if you don’t pay, you may still get premium benefits if your server’s sense of community is strong enough to make other members pay it forward. It’s even more incentive for Discord users to make servers kind and welcoming, not hostile and toxic like other online gaming community spaces. 

Continue to Communicate

In short, Discord is a cool, useful way to communicate with friends, and perhaps make new ones. For more opinions on Discord, read our full Discord review and see how Discord stacks up against Guilded, a similar chat service. In addition, check out The Best Video Conferencing Software and The Best Business VoIP Providers.