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.
Discord is where knowledge goes to die.
I never understood why people chose that as a meeting place for communities knowing that all the knowledge thrown in there is useless.
It’s obviously not great for the type of community that’s about knowledge sharing and learning, and it does suck that a lot of communities went there.
But it’s a great platform for simple social servers that are just about communicating. It’s super easy to sign up and set up a server. A lot of it just works well for chat.
Them going public probably puts a timer on the service though, so if it happens Discord probably just will get worse.
Yeah me neither. Easy to lose access by mod or discord bans, poor search and export capabilities… crazy option.
What free software alternatives are there?
revolt, matrix
I had not heard of Revolt before. Here is a link:
Matrix (Element or other clients) seems to be the most popular one.
Discord can go fuck itself!
rip discord. Shareholders cause enshittification
A friend of mine had Nitro silently activated on her account. No payment method attached, no transactions, just Nitro. They emailed support who replied with “Oh it’s our new promotion! You get to try it for free, no need to pay or add your card. We’ll ask for your money once it’s done.”
Which is absolute batshit evil drug dealer energy. I bet they rolled that promo out while the CFPB’s corpse was still warm.
Discord has been enshittified for years.
FR. I hate this app so much, and how necessary it has become for multiplayer gaming. I’m glad it’ll get worse and hopefully give people a strong reason to move.
That’s what I was going to say!
I thought it was public already
It’s already been getting pretty unbearable over the last few years anyway, but I’m probably being a grumpy bitch.
Alright, what’re we moving to next?
(Thank God, it’s finally over)
Is Mumble still a thing?
Mumble, or maybe TeamSpeak 6 (they skipped 4, had 5 in beta, which now is 6 in beta, oh well).
Depends on what you want. We’ve been using a TeamSpeak (3) server I’m hosting for years, it works as well as ever (they added a couple of QoL features to the TeamSpeak 3 client during the pandemic as well).
TeamSpeak 6 supports persistent chat via the Matrix protocol and you can register to any server and use that to login to any server using federation (as it uses Matrix under the hood). They now added screen sharing so you got the features covered that most users would want. They unfortunately didn’t release self-hostable TS6 server yet (but they say they’re working on it) so you can either use an experimental TS5 server (uses Matrix but doesn’t support screen sharing) or TS3 server, which doesn’t support any of the new stuff. The TS6 client is backwards compatible though.
I just don’t think they actually know where they want to go with it yet. They seem to be advertising the whole decentralized thing as that’s clearly a differentiating factor from Discord, but on the other hand they didn’t exactly prioritize putting out easy-to-setup server software yet. The TS6 client pretty much fully supports TS3 servers including administration, but as far as I know TS6 servers are quite a bit different. There’s also “communities” that work with TS6 servers in some way. So it’s all a bit of a messy mix between legacy support and their attempt at creating a decentralized Discord.
I hope they get it together and release TS6 server software, find a good way to monetize their efforts and get people to use it.
Some people will say that you could just use Matrix directly instead, but if they manage to make TS6 easy to use and understand, allow easy creation of a server (as a service) and also allow full-featured self-hosting it could turn out well. Plus they have the brand recognition, at least with folks that aren’t that young anymore. This might help with adoption. Sure, it’s proprietary still, but it’s decentralized and uses open protocols (Matrix). You can apparently already join TeamSpeak community chats from your own Matrix server, so they aren’t artificially blocking “vanilla” Matrix servers from federating.
Matrix.
Finally it’ll be possible to ACTUALLY have your own server then too.
Does Matrix do solid voice chat?
Is it approachable to the non-technical user?
Yeah, to both.
It would be cool if there was a matrix like text chat that combined mumble like voice chat in the same platform.
Revolt is the closest thing
Lame. Discord has already been dipping their toes into the enshitification pond the last few years, so I imagine it’s going to get worse as they move closer to going public and moreso afterwards.
Back to using Mumble.
I think my EverQuest guild might crash and burn at this…
it’s so over
