What do you think about discord?

It depends on where you go on Discord, like any other social media. Personally, Discord is literally the only social media I really use, apart from Lemmy. This is largely because the architecture is so well-suited to small, comfortable groups of friends. It feels more natural than the void-screaming feeling that feed-style social media imparts.

I've been happy with it, and so have my friends. We have a place where we can consistently meet up and hang out for Minecraft and D&D, and it's had reliable tools to facilitate that.

The massive public servers can feel very overwhelming, I'll give you that. The more well-managed ones feel like a favorite cafe, bar, or pub. The more hectic and poorly moderated ones feel like a warzone. Moderating them really is more or less the same skillset you'd need to run a bar, anyway.

As far as pedophiles, scammers, creeps, and generally nasty people go? Honestly, black mold grows in your bathroom if you don't open the window and air it out frequently. Evil people end up where target-rich environments are. Be vigilant, and you'll keep your people safe.

Hate it but currently the online doable voice chat for crossover gaming PC and Xbox. We really need a Teamspeak-App for Xbox

Discord Nitro is no where near as valuable as they claim it is. The profile templates are garbage, all they do is obstruct your profiles with choppy animations, I mean who'd want to pay $8 for this shit on top of paying however much Nitro is?

As far as going into other servers, you'll find yourself either in dead servers that only serve for minecraft purposes or just inane boring stuff. Those or you'll find yourself in overcrowded servers with annoying bots wanting verification and overzealous moderation staffs.

When used strictly as a messenger/video call/game/irc-like program, it's okay. I kinda like how there is all of that in one than in past days where you needed like 7 different programs. Although, it wouldn't hurt to have alternatives that also provide the same benefits.

Oh and the Discord staff themselves are shady ass people with questionable morals and judgment.

I only use it to communicate with people who I already know or are in the same social circles as me. I do not use it to meet new people.

It's a useful took for organizing server wide events and playing with friends.

I hate the SAAS enshittification it's undergoing with the rest of the web. Having to pay for profile customizations shouldn't be a thing. I remember editing my Neopets profile with HTML when I was 12. No paying, just learning how to tinker.

I really hate how groups are using it as a file storage system instead of running websites that are indexed and easier to find. But that's on them.

It's good for keeping communication in one place - I mainly use it to host ttrpg games, so my server has all the lore stuff in one channel, general chat in another, character ideas and discussion in a forum-style channel where each character can have their own thread, and a voice channel for when we're actually playing. Each campaign gets its own category, so players can also go back and check stuff out from old campaigns. I'd like to switch to an open alternative, but the few services that offer similar functionality are self hosted or still quite early in development so aren't reliable enough for my needs.

As a Discord user, I don't hate it but ever since lockdown, I'm getting up of many the larger communities are on Discord. It's really frustrating when the community in question would be whatever product and only way contact custom service is through there and not email (Looking at you, PixelFX) and open-source project where only way to contract devs or ask for help is through Discord as the search engine on Discord is terrible.

The only reason why I still on Discord despite my annoyance with that chat app is that most people are on there instead of places like Matrix, XMPP or IRC. The three I mention tend to have more a techy-nerd userbase which nothing wrong with that but it hard finding as much niches compare to Discord