By Jason and Stan

Video games are about people. They have the power to bring together people, from different walks of life, from different parts of the world, united by something they love. They help create memories filled with laughter, nostalgia, frustration, achievement, and togetherness. This is why we originally created Discord: we wanted a simple and easy way to capture and enable these feelings we experienced growing up playing games with friends.

But, over the past year, we’ve been asking you what really makes the magic of Discord. It turns out that, for a lot of you, it wasn’t just about video games anymore.

Games are what brought many of you on the platform, and we’ll always be grateful for that. As time passed, a lot of you realized, and vocalized, that you simply wanted a place designed to hang out and talk in the comfort of your own communities and friends. You wanted a place to have genuine conversations and spend quality time with people, whether catching up, learning something, or sharing ideas. A place where you and your world can truly belong.

You came to us and said Discord was this place. And for millions of you, it already felt like a home.

Today, many of you use Discord for day-to-day communication. You’re sharing thoughts about books, music, and art, creating servers to just be yourself and share moments with friends. Since we launched in 2015, Discord has grown to more than 100 million monthly active users. You spend 4 billion minutes in conversation daily across 6.7 million active servers. On a weekly basis, that’s 26 billion server conversation minutes across 13.5 million active servers.

These numbers humble us. It’s incredible to see the impact that Discord has made on your lives over the last five years.

We designed Discord for talking. There’s no endless scrolling, no news feed, and no tracking likes. No algorithms decide what you “should” see. We designed Discord to enable the experience and feelings we wanted to recreate: being together with your community and friends. You’ve made your servers into personal spaces filled with people you invited and set the topics of discussion. Your communities all have their own rules and norms of engagement, giving people fun roles and adding inside-joke emojis.

Discord is your place to talk.

In asking you what you want Discord to be, we heard that you want Discord to be more welcoming, more inclusive, and more trustworthy so more kinds of communities can find a home here. Many of you told us that the biggest misconception you hear about Discord is that it’s “only for gaming,” but you feel Discord’s for “literally everyone” and “for anyone who likes to talk.”

As you’ve used Discord for more and more than playing games, our branding didn’t keep up, and the way we talked about ourselves sent the wrong signal to the world, making it harder for you to bring your broader community on Discord. And we know that the first few interactions someone has with our service could be intimidating because Discord is complex with many features.

Today, we’re inviting the world in to reveal what we’ve been working on, all designed to make it easier for you to invite your communities and friends to your Discord home. And this is just the beginning.

We’ve streamlined the new user onboarding experience and added server video so it’s easier than ever to get together. There are new server templates that make it super easy to help your friends create new servers. We’ve fixed hundreds of bugs, increased voice & video capacity by 200 percent, and continue to invest in reliability and performance as our top priority. We’ve also made the jokes and references within the app less gaming specific to make sure everyone can take part in the fun and make Discord more welcoming. And we’re launching a new website with a new tagline: Your place to talk.

We’re also always working on keeping Discord safe and making it hostile to hate. We recently launched a Safety Center so everyone can understand our rules, know what behavior is acceptable or not on Discord, and the tools at your disposal to protect yourself from content or interactions you don’t want. We will continue to take decisive action against white supremacists, racists, and others who seek to use Discord for evil. Recently, on Juneteenth, we announced new company improvements and initiatives to strengthen civic engagement, social justice, and diversity on Discord. You can read more detail here.

This is just the beginning of Discord’s journey to be a place for all of your communities to talk and build relationships. We’re around for the long haul. Many of you have already signed up for Nitro, which has taken off over the last couple of years, and our recent $100 million in additional funding will help accelerate our investment in the community, new features, and the company. We’re deeply thankful to everyone who has supported us to get where we are today.

We all spend a lot of time in front of our screens. As we look back at the last few months, it’s clear that as people spend more and more time online, they want online spaces where they can find real humanity and belonging. This is what Stan and I were doing when we were teenagers sitting at home playing games, and it’s why we created Discord.

It’s been a remarkable and humbling adventure to bring this experience to life. We’re thrilled to be able to take the magic of online games and bring it to the rest of the world: the power to create belonging.

And we’re excited to work with you to continue to improve Discord. As always, let us know your thoughts and suggestions by hitting us up on Twitter at @jasoncitron and @svishnevskiy.

Expect to hear even more from us in the coming months about how we are working to help you bring your world to Discord.