What is Discord?
Over the past few years discord has become a hub where small, large, communities have come together to create a space for themselves. It has risen to become a massive platform where people share their ideas and communicate with each other at a deeper level than just a social media platform.
At Discord you can have video chats, voice chats, or text chats and many more with the community members. One of the biggest hurdles to Discord is the daunting task of being onboarded to use the platform. Most people when they see Discord they get overwhelmed because of the many things it has to offer, we will help you get started.
How to get started
One of the first things you will want to do is create and account with Discord. (https://discord.com/). Once your account has been created you are ready to start using Discord for what it truly is.
What are servers?
Remember Discord was first introduced to the gaming community and in the gaming community there are a lot of naming conventions that are used throughout that’s not normal in the day to day.
Servers on Discord is another name for a hub, or if you are familiar with Slack it’s where your job has their group hosted. You can join multiple servers at the same time and switch between each server if you have joined more than one. I recommend that you look around and find servers that you might want to join and start experiencing the communities on Discord.
You can also create a server for yourself to host for your friends, study group at school, baseball trading collection, anything you want.
Is it Secure?
Discord is very secure when it comes to their users' privacy and security. According to (https://discord.com/safety) . “Privacy is incredibly important to us. We do not monitor every server or every conversation. We do not sell your data, nor do we share it with third parties for advertising purposes.” Even when you are using the software they don’t require you to identify yourself using their platform so if you want to be anonymous, you can. That doesn’t mean they are not consequences if you want to be a troll on a server
How much is Discord?
Discord is free to use and doesn’t cost a single penny to use! But, how does Discord make money? Users have the ability to improve the services of a server by adding what’s called a boost to the server, more on this another time.
How to explore a public server?
To explore public servers and see what Discord has to offer with whatever interest you, if you are on the Pc / Mac version of the application. You will go on the bottom left corner and look for a button that says Explore Public Servers. There you can find what servers best interest you.
How to interact with channels?
Once you are in a server you will be on the left side of the space where it has many different sections on the screen. Each section or corresponding section has something called a channel. It depends on how it is set up by that server but you can categorize with how it best fits your community. Here at Loop we have it set up where you can request a category that you might find interested in and we might add depending on the community request.
You will click on a specific channel and interact with that specific text channel and start having conversations around that topic.
Discord has so much to offer
Discord is a very important part of a community in this digital age, and stay tuned with us as we go more in depth in how to use several features as we teach you the basics of how to use Discord and hopefully break that fear of it. We want our community to be empowered to use the platform and engage with us. We want to be able to communicate with our community because to us at Loop community is very important. Stay Tuned for more.
