https://archive.is/2025.03.06-011758/https://www.ft.com/content/4ab9efe7-36bc-44ff-b2cd-06eb2c38203a
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Gaming chat platform Discord in early talks with banks about public listing
US group has sought to broaden its appeal to a mass audience
Video game developer Jason Citron founded Discord in 2015 © Kimberly White/Getty Images/TechCrunch
Discord is in early talks with banks about a public listing, according to people familiar with the matter, in a sign of a possible revival in the sluggish US IPO market.
Founded in 2015 by video game developer Jason Citron, Discord offers multi-person voice, video and text-based spaces to its 200mn global monthly active users.
The San Francisco gaming chat platform was considering listing as early as 2021, according to people familiar with the matter. However, many technology companies and investors have put their IPO plans on hold due to political and market uncertainty.
That is expected to change this year as interest rates have fallen and US President Donald Trump has laid out a more tech-friendly regulatory agenda.
Discord was last valued at about $15bn in a 2021 fundraising, according to PitchBook. The company’s revived IPO plans remain subject to change, one of the people said.
“We understand there is a lot of interest around Discord’s future plans, but we do not comment on rumours or speculation,” the company said in a statement shared with the Financial Times. “Our focus remains on delivering the best possible experience for our users and building a strong, sustainable business.”
CoreWeave, an artificial intelligence cloud computing provider, filed for a New York IPO this month that would raise about $4bn and value the group at more than $35bn, which could make it the largest tech flotation of the year.
A series of valuable start-ups, including fintech groups Stripe and Chime and data platform Databricks that had been forced to stay private far longer than planned are expected to reignite plans to list their shares.
Discord initially found popularity among gamers, as well as retail trading and cryptocurrency communities, but has since sought to broaden its appeal to a mass audience.
The company has largely shunned advertising, in contrast to larger rivals such as Meta, X and Reddit, in favour of offering its users premium features for a fee.
In 2021, it attracted interest from multiple Big Tech groups, rebuffing a $12bn takeover bid from Microsoft. The recent IPO plans were first reported by The New York Times.
Boo you whore.
God fucking damnit can we just have one thing???
It was nice while it lasted.
Back to Ventrillo or TeamSpeak I guess…
Did I Mumble?
Looks like everyone needs to switch to [email protected]
I hate that everyone uses discord. Why can’t we use IRC which is obviously better and uses a tiny fraction of the system resources that discord uses?
Nickserv was always a stupid idea. In fact, calling nicknames “nicks” was always an ill-omen for how poorly conceived IRC was.
The onboarding process for IRC is just too much of a hassle. A lot of terrible, horribly awful design decisions went into it. The few people who use it are too resistant to change so there’s not really a point in promoting it.
Matrix is the replacement for discord, although it still needs work like adding channels.
The worst part about discord to me is that it’s used as a knowledge base for open source projects and games and such. This puts things in a walled garden. I instantly get turned off by a thing when the homepage is “join our discord” or I see a comment like “oh it’s explained in the discord.”
It’s only a matter of time before discord becomes paywalled, and all the knowledge out there ceases to be public.
I like to play rom hacks, and sure enough, most of them want you to join their Discord to get information about any upcoming updates or what the mod author is making next. I hate it to absolute death.
Just a replacement as a newsletter is totally fine.
What’s not good is knowledge being solely shared there instead of a Wiki.
Github literally has wiki functionality built-in.Agreed. For me it’s very hard to feel the same about software projects that are like “fuck the corporations! Learn more on our discord.” Because the mental gymnastics are wild
A lot of people just don’t see the bigger picture, and it shows.
I’ve been saying this for years, but the general mood still hasn’t shifted against Discord. People were actually amazed back when it added… forums. But now if the company is going public the enshittification is imminent.
I hate how companies will refer to their Discord for customer service… Fuck that shit. Should be illegal.
Discord was great when it had a goal to be a connection point for gaming parties but then they got greedy.
“Obviously better” this isn’t obvious to me at all. Just because you don’t use the many features it offers doesn’t mean other people don’t.
Reaction emojis, threads, screen sharing, and voice chat. IRC has none of these features. Better to get on the Matrix train
Ircv3 has reactions, and threads. Along with some other features, like persistent convos.
Voice and screen sharing can be implemented via external services.
Edited condo to convo… ircv3 does not have condos :)
Are you serious? That’s excellent news!
Matrix is so bad though. Slow, sometimes just doesn’t load, bridges are crap… Why would I want to switch to it?
Do you have an alternative to suggest or are you just here to whine?
Honestly if Discord went away I’d switch to posting notes on a cork board on the wall before I switched to Matrix in its current state.
Zulip.
“But I don’t want to eat the moldy cabbage on the ground outside!”
“Okay, do you have an alternative, or are you just gonna whine? Eat up!”
“We have these delicious carrots.”
“I ONLY WANT CABBAGE THAT’S BEEN SITTING OUT FOR A WEEK!”
My 4GBs agree. I literally cannot use discord. It takes ridiculous amounts of resource because you are meant to goddamn live in it, not just chat.
Because I don’t care to set up a bot that monitors what is being said while I’m offline. Matrix is actually better, though
Time to introduce my friends to the glory of TeamSpeak!
mumble works very well and is foss as well.
Ah, haven’t used that in a long while. I’ll add that to the list to peddle to my mates as well. Thank you!
You can even trivially run your own server on an old Raspberry Pi.
I used to run one on a Pi 2 that would regularly have ~100 concurrent users without any hiccups
It shut down, didnt it?
It’s been a number of years since I used it while playing Eve Online, but say it isn’t so! I’m going to check now!
Edit: Still exists!
I know they had a terrible redesign last year and then it went all terribly down hill
They had another redesign this year too as well, to try to make it more “discord-y” that’s currently in beta I believe.
Though I do think they’re a little too late…
They’ve been working on the redesign for awhile now, but the version everyone’s used to (Teamspeak 3) still works perfectly fine. TS3 clients can connect to new Teamspeak servers, and new Teamspeak clients can connect to old teamspeak servers, just without the new features like screen share
My group still uses TS3 on a daily basis on a self hosted server
Not very promising. What a shame.
I may have to go back to IRC, hell even running my own fucking server
How far along is this? Last time I checked it out is was no where near ready.
I mean, what’s “ready” mean in this context? Voice and video are still being worked on. They’re going for maximum compatibility so they have to reverse engineer the way Discord does things, so it’s taking a while.
Given we’re talking about a Discord replacement and you say voice and video are still being worked on I’d say it’s not ready to replace Discord smh
Where did that I say that it was though? I posted it as an alternative. Not once did I say or even hint that it was ready… You’re going to great lengths to put words in my mouth on a public forum where anyone can see what’s been written. It’s very bizarre.
Where did I say you had said it was ready? I answered your question on what “ready” means in the context. Talk about putting words in people’s mouths…
saving this for later, thanks
Ok time for Matrix & XMPP (or even IRC😉)
Well, I remember TeamSpeak being really good and easy to use.
Also proprietary and requires a “Gamer License” to host servers for more than 32 users.
Mumble is, and has always been, the king of voice chat apps and is completely FOSS. Also it works a lot better.
I’m calling it. Backup all your data and move it elsewhere, you may have to pay to access or have it deleted.
I’ve been frustrated with Discord already after their stint with NFTs 3 years ago, and now there are ads in the channel panel and the cost of Nitro has doubled. But, none of the FOSS alternatives work well enough to move my friends over there, in my experience. Hopefully this will spark some progress, especially if Discord goes the way of Tumblr/Reddit.
But, none of the FOSS alternatives work well enough to move my friends over there, in my experience.
Been slowly moving to Matrix/Element and was able to convince two buddies to at least make accounts, currently the biggest struggle we’ve had was with the voice channels.
There appears to be two types of voice channels; Jitsi & Element Call, Jitsi works okay but screen sharing appears to not work on either Windows or Linux and also doesn’t appear to allow mobile users to connect with desktop users and vice versa. Meanwhile Element Call seems to work perfectly but there is an unnecessary extra step to install the Element X beta app for mobile for it to work.
Another gripe about Matrix is spaces/room permissions, to my understanding Spaces are like discord servers so when I make a user an Admin you expect them to get admin privilege over every room right? Welp, it’s not and you have to give them admin for every single room also, once you give someone Admin you can’t remove it and they have to do it themselves. While I understand why it’s done this way I find it quite dumb.
The fact that Matrix is apart of the fediverse is enough for me to disregard the issues I mentioned above however, for others it can be seen as a deal-breaker.
Matrix really needs to add channels.
I’m not sure why they don’t just copy the features that should be standard from Discord.
Time to try Matrix again.
I guess it’s time for TeamSpeak to make a comeback
“User has joined your channel”
Discord was never “good”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvNkdAggUGU
