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.
I guess it’s time for TeamSpeak to make a comeback
“User has joined your channel”
I would be tempted to say that it will now turn to shit, but in Discord’s case it was pretty shit already.
But it might get even worse…somehow
Ads in chats?
Probably…
Oh my god that would be shit
FOSS alternative that looks and feels the same.
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
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
As we all know, UI is a fundamental part of any piece of software’s architecture and cannot be changed without a ground-up rewrite.
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.
They need to add voice rooms like discord/TS/mumble, where they are there in the sidebar and can be joined/left instantly.
Real-time game streaming like discord has is important also to get disord users to switch over.
The other issue I’ve had with getting gaming friends on matrix is its pretty slow sometimes, and clients don’t all have the same features which can be frustrating.
You can integrate it with Jitsi (also self hosted) and call, screenshare and whatever else you want there.
Terrible video calls. No screenshare last I checked. UI feels dated.
They are undoubtedly better, but neither of them feel like Discord. They are more like WhatsApp or Signal.
Not suited for the job.
but it can look similar to discord: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cinnyapp/cinny-site/main/assets/preview2-light.png
Well well, that surprises me. But it still lacks the features.
Btw image embedding can be done using this syntax:
aha thanks! i was wondering how ppl do this yeah but tbf discord has a lot of features
Matrix does not support custom emojis, which are the killer feature of Discord.
[Buy Turbo to unlock on all servers]
No man! Think of the future shareholders!! 😢
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?
Apparently they changed their policy on self-hosting. Last I checked they explicitly said that you can self-host (with a very complicated incomplete documentation) but it’s not intended to be self-hosted. He also said various other things that caught my attention but I don’t remember the details.
I’ll look at this more closely and see whether I like it.
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.
Does it show the current game one is playing?
No? But it can be implemented. Though I don’t think anyone really cares about it, so most likely it won’t. Revolt does not even advertise itself as a gaming chat platform, but just a chat platform.
I see, Lemmy advertises it heavily as an Discord alternative. That’s why I am asking it. I like that feature.
It is an alternative, an alternative without the bloat that is.
Some people like that blot.
And there goes another good company…
It’s a good company?
Discord has never been a good company, they can (and probably do) read all chat and data being uploaded there.
Jason Citron, the Discord founder and CEO, had a company called OpenFeint that got into a lot of trouble regarding selling illegally obtained private user data.
In 2011, OpenFeint was party to a class action suit with allegations including computer fraud, invasion of privacy, breach of contract, bad faith and seven other statutory violations. According to a news report “OpenFeint’s business plan included accessing and disclosing personal information without authorization to mobile-device application developers, advertising networks and web-analytic vendors that market mobile applications”.
https://www.courthousenews.com/gamers-say-openfeint-sold-them-out/
Seeing how well Reddit did in its IPO, it seems that this type of closed platforms keep people captive enough not to look elsewhere and bank on it. Investment wise that seems like a buy, unfortunately.
Anyone that need to clear their history https://discorch.org/
Browse and archive your messages, and easily request deletions — all while respecting Discord’s guidelines
This is exactly what I was looking for… Thank you so much. I was so close to paying for redact to deal with this.
Id say enshitification coming but discords kinda already shit so.
I may have to go back to IRC, hell even running my own fucking server
Discord was never “good”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvNkdAggUGU
I hate that everyone uses discord. Why can’t we use IRC which is obviously better and uses a tiny fraction of the system resources that discord uses?
Because I don’t care to set up a bot that monitors what is being said while I’m offline. Matrix is actually better, though
The worst part about discord to me is that it’s used as a knowledge base for open source projects and games and such. This puts things in a walled garden. I instantly get turned off by a thing when the homepage is “join our discord” or I see a comment like “oh it’s explained in the discord.”
It’s only a matter of time before discord becomes paywalled, and all the knowledge out there ceases to be public.
I like to play rom hacks, and sure enough, most of them want you to join their Discord to get information about any upcoming updates or what the mod author is making next. I hate it to absolute death.
Just a replacement as a newsletter is totally fine.
What’s not good is knowledge being solely shared there instead of a Wiki.
Github literally has wiki functionality built-in.Agreed. For me it’s very hard to feel the same about software projects that are like “fuck the corporations! Learn more on our discord.” Because the mental gymnastics are wild
A lot of people just don’t see the bigger picture, and it shows.
I’ve been saying this for years, but the general mood still hasn’t shifted against Discord. People were actually amazed back when it added… forums. But now if the company is going public the enshittification is imminent.
Reaction emojis, threads, screen sharing, and voice chat. IRC has none of these features. Better to get on the Matrix train
Matrix is so bad though. Slow, sometimes just doesn’t load, bridges are crap… Why would I want to switch to it?
Do you have an alternative to suggest or are you just here to whine?
Honestly if Discord went away I’d switch to posting notes on a cork board on the wall before I switched to Matrix in its current state.
Zulip.
“But I don’t want to eat the moldy cabbage on the ground outside!”
“Okay, do you have an alternative, or are you just gonna whine? Eat up!”
“We have these delicious carrots.”
“I ONLY WANT CABBAGE THAT’S BEEN SITTING OUT FOR A WEEK!”
Ircv3 has reactions, and threads. Along with some other features, like persistent convos.
Voice and screen sharing can be implemented via external services.
Edited condo to convo… ircv3 does not have condos :)
Are you serious? That’s excellent news!
I hate how companies will refer to their Discord for customer service… Fuck that shit. Should be illegal.
“Obviously better” this isn’t obvious to me at all. Just because you don’t use the many features it offers doesn’t mean other people don’t.
My 4GBs agree. I literally cannot use discord. It takes ridiculous amounts of resource because you are meant to goddamn live in it, not just chat.
Nickserv was always a stupid idea. In fact, calling nicknames “nicks” was always an ill-omen for how poorly conceived IRC was.
The onboarding process for IRC is just too much of a hassle. A lot of terrible, horribly awful design decisions went into it. The few people who use it are too resistant to change so there’s not really a point in promoting it.
Matrix is the replacement for discord, although it still needs work like adding channels.
Discord was great when it had a goal to be a connection point for gaming parties but then they got greedy.
God fucking damnit can we just have one thing???
There goes the neighborhood.
And all of your data that they’ve collected over the years.
Lots of very general light chat and shit posts. It doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of revenue potential there.
For a training set. Natural, and familiar conversations.
I don’t see that being worth much $$ given the massive quantities of that information already available on the web via forums and what not?
Different styles of conversation.
No, it’s definitely still valuable. It’s one of the biggest repositories of human-to-human communication on the web. I’m sure it will be even more valuable moving forward because you don’t want to train LLM models on LLM-generated stuff, and there isn’t as much incentive on a platform like Discord for bots to masquerade as users… unlike on a persistent public and searchable forum like Reddit, where there are obvious incentives to fabricate posts and comments to sell stuff/astroturf/spin public opinion. Bots exist, of course, but they’re identifiable and can be excluded.
That’s fair.
It’s one of the biggest repositories of human-to-human communication on the web.
I am showing my age and have spent decades on various web forums. These sites have thousands, or even tens of thousands, of users and huge quantities of threads some of which can be very deep. Yes, each individual site isn’t that big but there are tons of these things scattered around the web and I’m sure they’ve been crawled. One of the many, many, many manymanymany Ford Mustang forums has > 2 million replies. thirdgen.org, an 80s-early 90s Camaro/Firebird, forum has 763,427 threads with 6.45 million replies going back easily 20 years, which is well before bots.
Discord does have 154M monthly users, so you’re probably right that there is more content there than across all the various boards. It’s also probably a heck of a lot easier to crawl than a bunch of different web forums.
Yeah, they claim that as of 2022 they had trillions of messages in their database, and this website claims four billion messages are sent per day as of 2022, apparently according to Discord, although I wasn’t able to verify that source.
Can anyone with knowledge on business explain why these companies keep going public other than the simple fact of money?
I feel like everytime a company does they go full throttle into making shareholders money and lose sight of their original company. Honestly I assumed discord was already public based on some of their monetary features that are overpriced lol.
it’s literally just money
at a certain size companies are required to go public. and indeed, as a public company your first and only responsibility is ensuring shareholders can grow capital based on nonsense quarterly projections.
People overestimate the fiduciary responsibility of public companies. It’s true they will often pursue aggressive short term gains to attract more investment in several forms, including higher stock prices. But as long as they are arguably trying to help the company they are considered to have fulfilled their obligation. You have to be able to prove in court they are trying to harm the shareholders to run afoul of that responsibility, which is a fair hurdle. And it isn’t really that difficult to avoid a forced IPO by keeping under the 500 shareholder threshold if one really wants to avoid it.
There is no requirement to ever go public, in the US anyway. I work for a multi-billion dollar company that’s entirely privately held. It just tends to happen because it’s the best way for the equity holders to convert their ownership into cash. It can be hard to sell a whole company because that requires someone to go all in to buy it and they must accept all the risk of maintaining its value. But you can go public and get tons of investment money without having to sell.
it’s called a forced ipo and if’s a thing in the US specifically.
The company must have more than 500 equity holders and have more than $10 million in assets. If the company maintains a limited number of owners, they will never be required to go public regardless of their valuation.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/forced-initial-public-offering-ipo.asp
Valve is huge and still privately owned. There’s no requirement for a company to go public.
A forced ipo happens if they have over 500 share holders and $10 million in assets. It is easiest to avoid the shareholder amount.
It’s the path for the startup industry to rewards the venture capitalist investor basically either IPO by going public or M&A by being bought (like instagram by meta).
Here some more info on the different startup stages https://www.latitud.com/blog/stages-of-a-startup
Too many startups go for VC money when they shouldn’t. It’s a cancer.
If you’ve managed to bootstrap it, or get some non-vc money, things are growing and doing well, maybe just try to keep growing that way. Your company is fucked the moment you take that VC money.
I don’t think an app like Discord could exist without great initial investment
Discord probably not, but there are many that could.
I agree, but I understand the temptation. It can take your company from 0 to 100 almost instantly, since you have the budget to hire social media and SEO experts to take you to that magical “viral” status. Not doing this often means toiling in obscurity and never going anywhere. If you do manage to make enough money for your whole team to quit their day jobs, then it almost certainly took longer.
Quick and easy path leads to the Dark Side.
It’s about money, specifically with a near-term “exit strategy” for investors.
It lets them push the company into choices that will pump up the stock price so that early shareholders can sell their stock and walk away with profits… without any concern over how those choices will impact the company, its employees, its customers, or the new shareholders in the long term.
I won’t shed a tear for Discord, though. They are a parasitic corporation that extracts profit from the world’s online communities by using the network effect to lock our communications and collected knowledge behind their terms of service. No company should have control over so much of humanity’s cultural development and history.
👏
This is bad news for discord users. Making it a public company means that all their data will be up for sale when the company goes under
and also the enforced heavy moderation, will silence crtiics in favor of the most “ad-revenue, traffic groups too” thats whats happening with reddit.
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
It’s an actual platform. It’s basically FOSS discord.
Ohh found it, bad naming in terms of SEO. Does it have screen sharing or is it just a chat/call/videocall app? Personally me and my friends use discord for 2 reasons: Chatting and screensharing. We use teamspeak to talk during gaming
I did find out and do sorta use it now! Still don’t agree with the name though
