- cross-posted to:
- games@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- games@lemmy.world
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.
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Id say enshitification coming but discords kinda already shit so.
Discord sucks but this might be easy money if you join at the very start.
I don’t personally understand why people want to use it, but if you’re one of those people, https://revolt.chat/ might be a great alternative. They’re open source (at least for now).
Boo you whore.
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.
Matrix really needs to add channels.
I’m not sure why they don’t just copy the features that should be standard from Discord.
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.
Well, time to look for a new platform.
Check out Revolt. They’re trying to mimic Discord.
Did you know there’s a better open source product that fills this hole? It’s called matrix / synapse, only problem is the clients sucked at least two years ago
Enshittifcation imminent
Can it be any more enshitified tho?
Oh, it can get a lot worse
Pay $5 to send 50 messages per month. Then an additional $1 for every fifth message.
Discord: Hold my beer
Discord is completely fine. It doesn’t break. Practically no bugs. The only annoying thing is that sometimes the shop gets a red badge but that’s it
I completely disagree with this and have been for years.
It has often had connectivity issues, big lags, higher latencies and lower bitrates than Mumble or even TeamSpeak.
It’s super bloated, they churn out useless “features” so fast that it keeps making it use more resources and makes everything slower.
Until recently, being in voice call with more than 3-4 people made all my 16 cores attempt self destruction.
It is a freemium piece of bloatware.
Jesus fucking Christ, can I not just enjoy one thing in my life without it eventually turning adversarial?
“No. Fuck you. Pay me. Now pay me more. Now enjoy ads. Pay me again. We’re now introducing fees associated with the privilege of paying me. So pay that while paying me.”
– approximately everything
Dude i am so glad. Discord was always a cancer, i hope this will spell the beginning of the end of discord. Its the number one biggest offender in terms of limiting access to information on the internet right now. It needs to die.
The number of times I’ve been directed to a useless discord chat while looking for help on a topic is infuriating. Can’t wait for this shit to stop.
It also has plenty of utility for non-information-storing purposes. It’s more of a cultural issue than an issue with the tool.
Besides, wouldn’t it take all the information there to its grave as well, making its death a net information loss? After all, information confined it is still information stored somewhere, just not as easily accessible directly from the Web.
Information that cant be indexed by a search engine is completely worthless to anyone looking for answers. It might aswell not be there.
I don’t know why people trusted Discord, it’s one of the worst platforms and I say this while I use it because I had to settle for that (friends) like I had to settle for WhatsApp (family and work)
Irc was better for chat, ventilo and mumble better for audio, and matrix is pretty much the same but better. Discord sucks like Twitter did and I can’t wait for it to go away. And forums are a better platform for help and documentation.
Thank God I convinced my fiancee to move our VCs to Wire, away from WhatsApp and Discord.
Discord does exactly one thing not entirely shittily. It puts all those features in one place. It gets beat out in any one feature, but you can run an entire community within a Discord for free. You shouldn’t because it’s terrible at most of that and mediocre at the rest, but it’s free and just good enough if you bludgeon it into shape with tools and bots and stuff.
It’s free because you’re the product
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.
Reminder: Matrix is open source and federated
Matrix needs more time in the oven before it’s ready for widespread adoption.
I really did try to make it work (for months) but it’s a buggy and unpolished experience, everyone that tried it with me ended up going back to Discord and Signal for communication.
Unsure if this is satire about the Matrix or an actual platform that thought it was smart to call itself Matrix
I did find out and do sorta use it now! Still don’t agree with the name though
Well fuck. Time for a new platform.
I’ve been wanting a replacement for ages now. The problem is that Discord does everything it does very well (with a few exceptions), way better than any of its competitors. It’s incredibly hard to replace, because no other product really matches it in any category. Cost, ease of use, feature set, cross-app API support… Nobody else comes close; even if you paid a ton of money for premium services to replace Discord, you’re still likely going to downgrade your overall experience.
I really want to see more competition in this space.
Don’t worry, once it goes public it will get worse and easier to replace
Reminder that TeamSpeak still exists.
Windows, Mac, Linux clients for TS6, Win, Mac, Lin, iOS, Android clients for TS3.
Mumble also still exists, less official support for mobile clients tho.
TeamSpeak doesn’t include video and you don’t get notifications for posts in channels and there are no “chat only” channels. There is no media uploading or viewing within the client itself.
This is like pitching, ”just buy a bike” to someone who lives in the suburbs 50 miles from work.
Why do you need all those things to be in one single app?
because it’s way more convenient
Matrix (element?) can do everything Discord does.
it can’t. it does most things ok, but if I had to move my communities there, it would be hellish to get stuff running the way discord runs them.
Funny how you say “my communities” and then “discords run them”.
yes. like the act of running an application. usually when someone says they’re going to run something, it means that.
hope this helps!
My group of people is looking at moving to revolt if it happens
FOSS alternative that looks and feels the same.
No man! Think of the future shareholders!! 😢
you were right, a bit austere but essentially the same
You can customize all that with your own color scheme you get to chose. Which is kinda cool
It’s not meant to be selfhosted. And it’s not federated either. I don’t trust this. The developer seems very shady.
It’s not meant to be selfhosted.
https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted
it’s not federated
I’ll agree on that one. Though the FAQ says that it is not on their future roadmap, but is possible. https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html
The developer seems very shady
Why?
I’m just doing a bit of research (I’m also not the guy you were replying to :p), but I found the developer is really just one person seemingly (the only registered person I could find for the company representing Revolt [based in the UK]) and that is Pawel Makles. He’s also listed as the data controller of all of your data https://revolt.chat/legal/privacy
My concern at first glance is this guy is only 21 years old (born 2003). I don’t think the dev seems too shady from this quick look, but being only 21 with a bunch of private data doesn’t seem too stable imo.
Matrix and XMPP are decentralized, much better than Revolt for that purpose.
And the ui of those are terrible and will never have non technical people adopt them. Also discord has end to end encrypted video calls and screen share which neither of those two have
depending on which client you use, the ui can be very discord-like (this is cinny): https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cinnyapp/cinny-site/main/assets/preview2-light.png
Also matrix has calls (at least element does), though not sure about screen share. And since when was discord e2e?
I ll admit matrix was for a long time really slow but matrix 2.0 largely solves this and other usability issues. Calls and screen share are still not standardized but its all being worked on.
With matrix, its not just about building one app, its about building a decentralized ecosystem all connected by the matrix protocol. So things tend to take more time.
You can integrate it with Jitsi (also self hosted) and call, screenshare and whatever else you want there.
This only exelerates the enshittification that already started
accelerates
Did they fucking stutter? Exelerates.
The enshittification has finally struck the English language
I blame dyslexia in combination with english not being my first language
Every time something goes public it turns into shit. Every single time.
