Discord Communities: What They Are and How to Find Them!
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Originally Posted On: https://partnersinfire.com/passion-fire-2/discord-communities/
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Discord is generally thought of as a gaming app. People use it to build their audiences on Twitch and collaborate in gaming communities. Although it started specifically for gamers, it’s grown in leaps and bounds. There are thousands of Discord communities in hundreds of niches. And with it becoming more well-known, more and more communities are moving to it. Here’s a rundown of the different types of communities you can find on Discord – and how to find the communities you are interested in.
Table of Contents
What is Discord?
Before diving into the numerous types of communities present on Discord, let’s take a quick look at what it is. At its core, Discord is an instant messaging app. You can use it to chat with people from all over the world via text chat, group chat, and even video chat.
But it’s so much more than that. It has bot integrations that allow you to build your server in a multitude of different ways. It has a wide range of emojis available to help you personalize and brand your server. These things make it the go-to app for a wide array of communities.
Discord Communities
You will find many different types of communities on Discord. From gaming to education, fan to finance, Discord is the place to meet and interact with folks who share your interests.
Gaming Communities
When most people think of Discord, they think of gaming. The app was originally designed as a way for gamers to chat and interact while playing together and is still widely used in the gaming community.
Many gamers use it to talk and interact with their friends. Sometimes a Discord server can start with real-life friends and expand to include friends made within a game. Sam, Founder of Games Like Finder, is an avid gamer and uses Discord regularly to interact with other gamers. Although not a streamer himself, he really enjoys streaming communities because they help him find gamers to play with.
There are also numerous communities surrounding specific games that can be used to find groups to play with. Robert from the Senpai Blog uses Discord mainly to play Pokemon Go. He used the app with his friends to share information on the locations of Pokemon. Charlotte, a Software Engineer and founder of Robot Powered Home, mainly uses it to interact with others who play Age of Empire and World of WarCraft. There are Discord communities about almost any game you can think of. These communities built around a specific game help people find like-minded folks to play with.
Content Creator Communities
Content Creators in various niches use Discord to network, keep engaged with their fans, and build their communities. There are tons of streamer support communities out there for networking with other streamers and gaining viewers on Twitch, but most streamers also have their own servers, which they use to interact with their fans.
Content creators on other platforms are also moving to Discord. Carol, a content creator on Patreon, uses Discord to engage with her Patreons. Anyone who purchases any level of her content gains access to her exclusive Discord community. Ryan, a Youtuber, uses it to engage with other Youtubers in Youtube Creator Café and Creators Unite communities.
These creator-specific communities are great ways for content creators to collaborate and offer a sense of community to their fans.
Finance Communities
Did you know that you can find a plethora of finance communities on Discord? I love it when the things I love and write about come together! My favorite financial Discord community is, of course, the Women’s Personal Finance community. All of my favorite female financial gurus from Twitter are there, and it’s a great place for women to engage with each other on important financial topics. It’s a brand-new community built from the Facebook group of the same name and was created by Angela of Tread Lightly Retire Early and Regina from That Frugal Pharmacist. It’s been a wonderful resource for promoting women in the niche and understanding the financial needs of women.
I’m also in a FIRE Discord community, where FIRE seekers discuss our goals and try to keep each other accountable. This is a fun place to talk with others interested in seeking financial independence and get money tips and encouragement. Being part of these communities has helped me identify how much money I really need to achieve financial independence.
There are so many other financial communities on Discord, many of which are dedicated to a specific aspect of personal finance. Elizabeth, the creator of Baby Gadget List, mainly uses Discord for its financial resources. She’s a member of a few stock market communities on the platform that discuss all aspects of stock trading. There are also Discord communities that discuss crypto, real estate, building wealth, and various niche financial topics.
Fan Communities
Many people use Discord to interact with their favorite creators and keep up with what they are doing. Joan, CEO of the Sweat Relief Company and a big music fan, uses Discord to stay up to date with her favorite DJ, DJ Cody. When the pandemic hit and New York shut down, DJ Cody set up dance parties in Discord for his fans so that they could continue to engage and interact with each other. This helped the fans stay connected with one of their favorite creators and each other as well.
There are fan communities on Discord for nearly anything that you are interested in. Sam, who discussed using streaming communities above, also uses Discord to interact with fans of his favorite anime shows. It’s fun to talk with people who share your niche interest – and Discord makes it easy!
Education Communities
You wouldn’t think that an application notorious for gaming would also be one of the best places to learn a new skill, but it is. Many people use Discord to learn new things and network with others interested in similar fields.
Esihle Makitshi, a software developer, uses Discord to learn more about programming. There are Discord servers dedicated to various aspects of IT, and whenever he gets stuck on Python or SQL, there are always experts around willing to help out. There are also Discord communities dedicated to helping people learn how to code and general tech support Discords.
Educational Discord communities are not limited to the tech space. There are also Discord servers dedicated to helping people learn languages, helping kids with homework, and general science servers designed to help people learn and understand difficult scientific topics.
Business Uses
Discord is quickly becoming a go-to app for business use. Although Slack is still a top competitor, there are many reasons why a business would want to choose Discord over slack. First, Discord is totally free unless you want the perks of Nitro. With Slack, you lose messages after two weeks unless you upgrade to a paid plan. Also, Discord has the ability to have voice calls, video calls, and screen sharing built-in. These options are only available with Slack’s paid features.
Slack does have one advantage to Discord, and that’s the ability to reply to a comment in a thread. Unfortunately, Discord lacks that capability, but it’s still a top choice for businesses given the other free features.
David Anderton-Yang, Chief Executive Officer with Voomer, Inc, said his company uses Discord as the primary communications channel due to the fluid and dynamic user interface. In addition, the wide array of Discord bots available allows him to gamify work challenges, making the work more challenging and engaging. Integrating the bots with other applications, such as Zapier, has made notifying the team and specific members of project changes and updates incredibly easy as well.
Chaz Nahas, Director of Marketing for Investors Club, a business that helps people buy and sell websites within a digital marketplace, uses Discord to interact with his remote team. The easily customizable channels make it easy to create break-out rooms for individual projects, and being able to communicate directly in the app helps keep emails clutter-free. Investors Club is also starting to use the app to offer VIP services to its clients, which, although new, looks like a promising way to increase revenue.
Ishaan Mishra, a multimedia director in sports media, loves that he can use Discord to share media projects via the screen sharing feature and discuss changes with his team in real-time.
Companies are even using the app to improve and promote their company cultures. David, Community Development Organizer with Blueshark Digital, created a few Discord communities for his staff to engage with each other after hours. They made a private Minecraft server and use Discord to communicate while playing together, and also to chat and engage with each other socially. This server has helped maintain the culture of community and family while employees worked remotely.
Discord Communities for Everything
There are discord communities for everything you could possibly think of. There are communities for artists learning how to draw, folks looking to pursue their passion projects, and people who want to share their love of journaling. Niche Discord communities abound in almost any topic you can think of.
How to Find Discord Communities to Join
Discord sounds great, doesn’t it? There are so many people on the platform doing so many fun and different things! There is absolutely a community out there that will meet your needs.
The biggest problem with Discord, though, is discoverability. It’s not easy to find the server you are looking for to best meet your needs. Many servers are very niche and hard to find if you don’t already know about them.
The easiest way to get started on Discord is to join one of the many large partner communities. There are partner communities available in several niches, from individual games to learning how to code. To explore these communities, log into Discord and look to the left-hand side of the screen with the icons for all the servers you are in. At the bottom, there will be a little circle with a compass icon in it. When you hover over this, you will see the “explore public servers” message. Click on this. It will take you to the Discover page, where you can browse the publicly available servers.
After you get started, it’s easier than you might think to find servers you are interested in. Networking with people who have similar interests is a great start. Many Discord communities rely on word of mouth to spread, and when someone you know is in a good one, they will be happy to share. You can also browse top.gg for servers, but the searchability on that site isn’t the best.
Get Started With Discord!
Now that you know how versatile Discord is – what are you waiting for? Take a tour of it, make some new friends, and get your chat on! If you’re a content creator, try making a server, see how it goes. You might be surprised at how much you like it!