Since it launched five years ago, Discord has been a popular place for gamers to gather and communicate. It's primarily a chat app, although it's recently been used for livestreaming games via Go Live as well. The Discord devs recently announced that they are shifting the focus of the app away from gaming and toward the tagline "your place to talk."

More and more people have been using Discord during the pandemic, enough that Discord expanded its server capacity to make room forall the new members and servers. Discord reports that it now has over 100 million "monthly active users" and 6.7 million active servers. Most servers are no longer focused on gaming, but have expanded to include fandoms, roleplay groups, and more.

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Discord has implemented new features so that its new branding reflects what most people actually use the service for. There's now an easier user onboarding, server video, and server templates. Discord voiced its desire to create a more welcoming, accessible, and customizable experience for everyone so that they aren't just known as a gaming messaging app anymore, but as a more versatile service.

The devs have also included bug fixes, voice and video capacity, and a new Safety Center to report malicious usage of the app. Discord released a background noise suppression function a few months ago, but the Voice Chat isn't perfect, so upgraded voice capacity now is helpful. Many users simply want to chat or message each other on servers, but Discord Voice Chat has joined Zoom and Facebook  Messenger Live as increasingly used services for people to connect remotely while in quarantine.

Allowing users to customize their own experiences is a growing concern for app and game devs. Discord supports server bots that can do anything from play music in the background to help people play Dungeons and Dragons remotely. It's clear that the Discord devs have always focused on allowing servers and users to curate and customize their own experiences in the app, and switching the app focus to chatting instead of gaming just makes this official.

Although more people now use Discord just to chat, it still has a thriving gaming community. However, even the gaming community has become more versatile, creating servers like a villager giveaway server for Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Whatever people are using their servers for, increased versatility and accessibility in the app should be beneficial to everyone.

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Source: Discord Blog