As engineers ourselves, we deeply respect and value the open source software community. Discord is built out of hundreds of projects. To our surprise, many open source communities have adopted Discord for their own discussions. Today we are launching a site highlighting the open source communities who live on Discord.
When Reactiflux came to us years ago saying they were being kicked off Slack due to scaling reasons, we were skeptical that non-gaming communities could thrive on Discord. We were wrong: Reactiflux has grown to over 13,000 users, with 2,000–3,000 active at any one time, more than most other chat app communities.
And they are not the only ones: we have also seen Vue.js, ReasonML, Elixir, and Yarn become vibrant and communicative groups on Discord. They have tried using other chat apps, but have run into the limits of those platforms.
It turns out that not only is Discord easy to use, but many open source developers already have Discord accounts because they play games. One Discord account gets you access to every open source community, so the invite link is all people need to begin participating. Discord also has robust moderation and blocking tools which serve open source projects well. We also support webhooks from GitHub as well as Slack.
Discord has features that both gamers and developers value:
- Core features are free forever
- Infinite message history
- Unlimited members
- Unlimited search
- Familiarity of Discord (100m+ people use it)
- Syntax highlighting
- Tool integrations
- Voice and video chat
- Screen sharing
- Moderation, roles, and permissions
- Private ad-hoc groups
We hope you’ll give Discord a shot for your open source community! Let us know if you have any feedback on our twitter @discordapp. You can add your own group to the open source list by making a PR.
Want to help build Discord? We’re hiring!
