Technically described as a VoIP, instant messaging and digital distribution platform, Discord allows its users to communicate with voice calls, video calls, text messaging and sending media files with such ease that makes old forums cry. 😭
The platform became the true game changer on 2015 (to the date) in the virtual communications sector, especially regarding the gaming communities. In the past, it was usual, when playing online multiplayer games, to use tools such as TeamSpeak, Raidcall or Ventrilo (between many others) to organize teams or groups of people. This need hasn’t changed and is still very important today, but the main common issue with these aforementioned services was that you needed a paid subscription, they would crash often or they had limited features.
However, Discord joined the party with a new very intuitive interface, allowing the creation of free servers to everyone, the ability to configure channels easily and share content like pictures, gifs, documents and songs too. And what’s more! Stream-share your screen with the rest of people in a channel. Interestingly, the servers wouldn’t crash often either.
The main key, on my opinion, that made it so popular lies in the separation between text and voice channels. This allows the people to be able to have conversations or follow discussions in a redacted, organized and direct manner as if it was a chat, while still being able to meet and talk, when necessary, from the same interface, created a new way of understanding communication platforms.
The service Discord has offered and continues to offer in the way it does, is so valuable, that it feels painful just imagining what would mean having it gone and needing the combination of many other tools to achieve the same goal.
For us, using Discord isn’t only great for keeping logs of our work progress and sharing materials as a team, but also it gives us the space to create a community. A place where to share not only materials and contents related to our videogame with others, but also regarding pollinators in general. A place where to create different windows from which to learn about the pollinators and different ways on how to help them. 🐝🦋🐞🌼
Something I really like is how you can have text-channel groups and thus keep everything nice and tidy into toggles. This works wonders for our project as the Bee Role Path section is quite long once you level up to the max, and having the chance of compress it to see the rest of channels becomes crucial.
Have I mentioned that you can use it from any browser (no need for installation) but also with a phone app? And that we have a channel we invite you to join in? Don’t be shy! We are looking forward to have new members to our hive!
Here you can see how we organize our channel:
