1. To DeDoS a Teamspeak server, it's enough to DeDoS a single server. You may not even need to do that, it may be enough to be such a nuisance that their host kicks them out. To DeDoS a Discord server, it's necessary to DeDoS the entirety of Discord, which is much, much harder, and also much more likely to put you in legal hot water. Discord is the Cloudflare of gaming.
2. Discord servers aren't real servers, they're tenants in an application, effectively "rows in an SQL table", not standalone containers requiring their own tech stack. This means they can be offered for free. You also can't abuse them for E.G. crypto mining, like you can with a VPS where a Teamspeak server can be hosted. Free increases adoption, which makes people a lot more likely to pay for extra features. It's the standard "the rich subsidize the poor" model, common to so many web applications.
3. No technical expertise necessary to set a server up. Bus factor is basically equal to infinity.
4. One service, one account, one interface, many servers, many groups, many people. There's no weird workspace switching and per-workspace DMs like in Slack (not sure how TS does this). If you log in once on a new device, all your server memberships are there, and everything just works. You may be in dozens of servers, and they're all behind the same single login.
Those 4 features are table stakes now, like it or not. If you want to be a real, long-term Discord competitor and attract real users, you have to figure out how to get those 4.
1. Yes and no. Discord "guilds" have their metadata and chat messages managed by a single shard somewhere in GCP. However, voice is managed using servers hosted by ID3, a much smaller provider. If you find the right websocket server you can repeatedly take down voice instances still.
2. Emojis are just lines in a database, and yet they still charge a fee for that. The reason why it's free is because that's the selling point. Also, that sharded "guild" is actually part of a sharded container that still has a cost to run, and manages the write-lock for the data in that "gimme".
The whole tangent here feels weird since I _choose_ what to run on "my" VPS. Noisy neighbors have been a solved problem for decades.
3. This is actually the killer feature, centralization sells because of network effects. You're only on Discord because your friends are on Discord.
4. Teamspeak has this with myTeamspeak now. You've been able to have multiple sessions for a long time, but now it's in a nicer interface.
If you want to run a community with SUPER easy access to everything from live video chats with a hundred members to forums, excellent access controls, integrations for absolutely anything especially if you also use bots from the marketplace, Discord is there and it's free, and it always works.
It's really rough to compete with that.
Discord did a great job of making it easy and free to get all of your friends into a group together. Everything just works. You don’t need to have an IT person in the group to set up the server and walk everyone through connecting.
In the early days of gaming it seemed like every gaming group had at least one person who worked in tech and didn’t mind setting up a server. Now gaming is mainstream and the average gaming group doesn’t have a person who can host a server for them. Even when they do, that person would rather spend their gaming time on playing the games instead of playing the IT person for the group.
I’m kind of salty about making a fruitless effort I’ll admit, but I feel like unless there’s an effortless, perfect, free program that replicates the (voice) channel functionality and screen sharing features people are not going to leave Discord. Even if it does treat its users like shit.
I miss those guys but I refuse to take part in that abuse, and I’m angry about it.
Yes there is
Now that money has finally run out, it looks like things are reverting back to normal.
So yes, it looks like the money has run out and rather than pushing for direct monetization they try to turn to shadier stuff - get as much personal data as possible to either make the company look juicier for either an IPO or an acquisition.