This story was originally published on Passionfruit.
Discord is a voice, video, and text messaging community-building platform, initially geared towards gamers when founded in 2015. But today, Discord has made its mark across both mainstream and niche internet culture—evidenced by its large presence spanning a multitude of fandoms, like Minecraft and virtual avatars, at VidCon 2022.
It was made clear at VidCon that creators with various sized audiences have made Discord an integral part of their community management and fan engagement strategy. One of the events drawing one of the largest, most fervorous crowds this weekend was the Dream SMP panel—a crew of Minecraft players with millions of young fans and large Discord servers with hundreds of thousands of members.
Servers on Discord are basically chat rooms—sometimes public and sometimes private or invite-only—which often are held together by ritualistic events, language, community roles, and exclusive access to a creator’s time and attention.
