The public sees Discord as a gaming app, but it offers far more. Discord hosts a wide range of communities in hundreds of niches.
As the messaging app continues to grow in popularity, more and more people are using it to expand their online networks.
Learn how these thriving Discord communities work and how to find the perfect ones to join.
Table of Contents
What is Discord?
Before diving into the numerous types of communities on Discord, let’s take a quick look at the platform offers.
At its core, Discord is an instant messaging app. It allows users to chat with people worldwide via text chat, group chat, and video chat.
But it’s so much more than that.
The app allows you to build online meeting rooms for your community called Discord servers. Anyone can create a server for any reason. The servers are highly customizable, allowing integrations with thousands of bots across the internet for various tasks and branding options like custom emojis, photos, and channels for those building a business online.
Discord’s wide range of functionality makes the platform a go-to for those seeking to build online communities.
Discord Communities
Discord hosts millions of communities across a broad spectrum of niches. The platform offers gaming, education, fans, finance, and lifestyle servers.
It’s the best way to meet and interact with folks worldwide who share your interests.
Discover the wide range of discord communities available:
Gaming Communities
Most people still think of Discord as a gaming app. The company started as a way for gamers to chat and interact while playing their favorite games together, and it’s still widely used in the gaming community.
Many gamers use the app to talk and interact with their friends. Often, a friend group creates a private server to keep in touch wherever life takes them.
Different Types of Gaming Communities on Discord
Sometimes, these friend servers expand to include online friends. Sam, founder of Games Like Finder, is an avid gamer who uses Discord to interact with other gamers. Although not a streamer, he enjoys streaming communities because they help him find gamers to play with.
Some gaming Discord communities revolve around a specific game, allowing members to find people to play with. Robert from the Senpai Blog uses it to play Pokémon Go. He used the app with his friends to share information on Pokemon locations.
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.
Whichever game you love, you can find a Discord community filled with other players.
Life Coaching and Inspiration
Some Discord communities seek to motivate and inspire their communities. Partners in Fire hosts a life coaching community on Discord, helping people ignite their passions and live their best lives.
It’s brand new, so it doesn’t have many members yet, but we’re hoping to grow it into a thriving community of like-minded individuals seeking to improve their lives.
Content Creator Communities
Content Creators in various niches use Discord to network, keep engaged with their fans, and build their communities.
The app hosts numerous streamer support communities, allowing up-and-coming streamers to network with each other and grow their Twitch viewership. 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—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 the 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
Discord hosts many personal finance communities. My favorite is Women’s Personal Finance, a space where my favorite female financial gurus from Twitter gather and engage in vital financial conversations.
It’s been an excellent resource for promoting women in the niche and understanding the financial needs of women.
There are also finance Discord communities related to niche aspects of personal finance. Some focus on the FIRE movement, while others are dedicated to stock market investing.
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.
Fan Communities
Most of the internet’s biggest stars host Discord communities to interact with their fans.
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 to continue engaging and interacting with each other.
But fan communities don’t just revolve around celebrities. You can find a fan community on Discord for nearly any interest. There are anime servers, music servers, and even cat servers.
Whatever you love, you can find a community on Discord. And if not, you can build one.
Education Communities
Discord is the best place to learn a new skill. It hosts hundreds of servers dedicated to education in various subjects.
Esihle Makitshi, a software developer, uses Discord to learn more about programming, as the platform features hundreds of servers dedicated to various aspects of IT. Whenever he gets stuck on Python or SQL, there are always experts around who are willing to help out.
Some Discord communities are dedicated to helping people learn how to code, while others offer general tech support.
Educational Discord communities are not limited to the tech space. You can find servers dedicated to language learning, helping kids with homework, art, science, and more.
Business Uses
DVKi via Shutterstock.com.
Discord is quickly becoming a go-to app for business use.
Although Slack is still a top competitor, Discord offers much more for less, making it ideal for entrepreneurs needing a meeting space.
Discord’s core functionality is free. Their paid service, Nitro, offers plenty of perks, but you don’t NEED any of them to run a server. Discord offers free voice calls, video calls, and screen sharing, which are only available with Slack’s paid features.
How Businesses Use Discord Communities
David Anderton-Yang, CEO of Voomer, Inc., said his company uses Discord as the primary communications channel due to its fluid and dynamic user interface. In addition, the vast array of Discord bots available allows him to gamify work challenges, making the work more challenging and engaging.
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 creating break-out rooms for individual projects manageable, and communicating directly in the app helps keep emails clutter-free. Investors Club is also using the app to offer VIP services to its clients, which, although new, looks like a promising way to increase revenue.
Companies are even using the app to improve and promote their company cultures.
David, a Community Development Organizer with Blueshark Digital, created Discord communities for his staff to engage with each other after hours. They made a private Minecraft server and used Discord to communicate while playing together, chatting, and engaging socially. This server has helped maintain the culture of community and family while employees work remotely.
Discord Communities for Everything
There are Discord communities for nearly any subject. The app hosts groups for artists learning how to draw, people looking to pursue their passion projects, and people who want to share their love of journaling.
Niche Discord communities abound in almost any topic.
Find Discord Communities
Discord’s biggest limitation is poor discoverability. Finding the best server that meets your needs can be a challenge.
However, communities like it that way. They’re supposed to be private, invite-only communities hidden away from the prying eyes of the open internet.
Finding them is a challenge but worth the effort.
Start with Partner Communities
The easiest way to get started on Discord is to join one of the many partner communities, which are massive servers that Discord promotes on its site due to their popularity.
You can find partner communities in various niches, from individual games to education.
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, you will see a little circle with a compass icon. The word “Discover” will appear when you hover over the compass. Click on it to navigate to Discord’s Discover page, where you can browse the publicly available servers.
Finding More Discord Communities
Finding new servers to join becomes easy once you get the hang of it. Many Discord communities rely on word of mouth, so networking with people sharing your interests is a great place to start. People love sharing their favorite communities.
You can also browse fan sites and social media for links to Discord servers sharing your interests.
Join Discord Communities Today
Have you joined Discord yet? If not, it’s time to start!
Take a tour, make some new friends, and get your chat on! If you’re a content creator, try making a server and see how it goes.
You might be surprised at how much you like it!