And if a friend decides not to create an account when joining your channel through an instant invite, the temporary account they created will remain in the ‘Offline’ user list until you manually kick it-I once had four different versions of a friend populating the user list before I forced them to make an account. I don’t like that you can’t minimize images or YouTube videos posted into the text chat without turning them off altogether, which means chat logs can get buried under a few links shared at once. Like Citron said, there are still areas Discord can be improved. So the browser thinks it’s doing peer-to-peer, but it’s not.” “We actually built this crazy server in C++ that sits in our infrastructure that the browser connects to thinking it’s connecting to one person,” Citron said, “but then we proxy all of the other users from our distributed backend through that fake peer and then send it to the browser.

Discord is using the HTML5 standard called WebRTC that’s built into most modern browsers, but tricks it to be safer and faster. You don’t need to host a server, download a program, or even sign up for an account you just send a link out to the people you want to join, and they’re there.Įarlier this week, I did just that and hopped into a Discord channel with CEO and Founder Jason Citron, who told me “it actually was not simple” to make the service work that way. The voice quality is crisper and clearer thanks to a more modern voice engine than what’s used by the now decade-and-a-half-old choices like TeamSpeak and Ventrilo, and Discord is also significantly more lightweight.

It’s not that Mumble or TeamSpeak aren’t still good options, it’s just that Discord has made such an appealing service that I’m not sure why I would ever want to go back.

How to call people on discord