Discord, the Communication Platform for Everyone

Discord is a texting, voice chat, and video chatting platform, at a very flexible level.
This means you can use discord to talk to just one or 2 friends, in a small chat with just a few friends. Or you can make an entire server like slack, and have over 10,000 members, such as the Unreal Engine Discord.

Discord is also stable, and much more robust than a lot of other communication platforms.
Even with 10,000 members in the UE4 Discord server, I can look up past messages, talk to people, and chat without any lag or delay. This is an issue with slack, at least for me. It would get slow and very laggy at times.

Unreal Engine recently moved over from Slack to Discord, and let me say, there was one huge difference in performance.

What also makes Discord very useful, is its close integration of voice comms.
You can hop in a voice channel just as quick and easy as hopping into a texting channel.
So in very little time, you can have a conversation with someone in whatever medium that works best for the situation. At this time, you can fit over 5,000 people in one discord voice room.

Discord also has a much better interface than other communication platforms.
Everything is laid out very close to how Slack is laid out, but with the addition of voice channels. There is also search bars, to search older messages. They also have a very robust @ notification search system, that is very similar to what Slack has. This said Discord has felt more stable in this aspect.
Flexibility and control.

Discord excels in its ability to allow you to create ranks, make users mods, adjust the power of said mods, and make special channels for certain users. This is just a small amount of control that Discord can give you. There are many many ways of customizing and making your Discord server just how you want it.
Discord now has Screen sharing and video calls.
In Discord, you can also make a group channel.

This is very different than the Discord servers that you can make, that hold thousands of people. Discord group messaging rooms are for smaller groups of people, normally consisting of 2-15 users.

Inside these rooms, you can chat with each other, in a single chatting channel, just like a Slack Whisper channel, just with more people. You can call up to 10 people, and share your Computer's screen, as well as use a camera for live video calls. Since this feature is limited to a small group of 10 users, your not going to be using it to do video calls with massive groups of 50+ people, but it's great for a team to get in contact with and start sharing ideas. This said, moving from a full discord server and hopping into a small group channel to do a video call is quick and simple.

So it's not much of an issue communicating in large scale.
Especially since you use the same application and simply click on the group channel and hop into it, which will automatically take you out of the voice channel you might have been in on the full Discord Server server.

Next up, is a huge feature that Discord has.

This feature is unlimited storage. Yep, that's right, no data cap on the history of files, images, text, or any other type of files upload. You can keep uploading or texting, and its always there. Discord will never remove them. This said you can still delete them, or members that you give permission to. This said Discord is NOT an alternative to backing up your data. There servers can still go down, and loose information. Discord also does not prioritize protecting your data either, so if something goes wrong, your data will be tossed away if needed to fix the issue. As a general rule though, stuff is not removed.

You are probably wondering what the catch is.

Well, there really instant one, except one thing.
The way discord balances out how much data hits its servers, is that you're limited to just 60 megs in a single file your allowed to upload. So yes, if you spliced a movie up into like 50 segments, you could upload and download it from discord. Since this isn't that practical, you most likely will not use discord for this.
This said you can always use Google drive and Dropbox links in discord, with work great with it.

Compatibility.
Discord is easily compatible with almost everything. You can download it for Windows, Mac, Linux, and even run it in a web browser if you don't want to download it.
There is also an app out for Android and iOS if you want to communicate on mobile.
Speaking of the mobile version of Discord, I would like to say, it's AMAZING!
The Discord app for both Android and iOS are both really well made. They run much better than Slack ever did for some reason. You can use all the features that the PC or Mac Desktop versions of the app have, including Voice, texting, screen share, and video calls.
You just can't share your phone's screen with other users in a video call. This said you can use the camera on your phone to share a video feed.

Security.
Discord has amazing security. It goes above and beyond keeping your personal info safe. One of the many things I'm talking about here is your IP address. So many systems, such as TS and Skype leave this info wide open. Not the case with Discord.
This is there official remark on this topic.

"Encrypted server to client communication keeps your IP address safe. Stop getting ganked because you're logged into Skype.
Our resilient Erlang backend running on the cloud has built-in DDoS protection with automatic server failover."

On top of this, no one can join or see the Discord server your in, unless you send an invite link to them. This means, the only people that join your server, and people you personally have sent a link to.

Also, the only way to add someone to your friend's list, or message them, is if they know your name. Thankfully, the only way they can learn what your Discord name is is by either joining a server your in or if you send it to them. Long story short, no more random whisper invites people like Skype...

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this far.
I really hope this has helped shed some light on what discord is, and what you can use it for.
Thanks again,
John. AKA (Epic J Creations)