Discord, an online text and voice chat application, originally launched solely focused on video games and the people who play them. It even worked on its own digital storefront and game distribution service. Today, however, Discord announced that it is aiming for a more general-purpose communication platform.

"We designed Discord to talk. No endless scrolling, no news feeds, no likes to track," said Jason Citron, Discord's founder and CEO, "No algorithm decides what you 'should' see. We designed Discord to enable the experience and feeling we wanted to replicate: being with community and friends."

"As people began to use Discord for more than just playing games, our branding started to fall behind, and the way we talked about ourselves sent the wrong signal to the world, making it difficult to attract a broad community to Discord. We also know that Discord is complex with many features, so the first few times someone uses our service can be intimidating.

To reduce that complexity, Discord says it has added new server templates to help "streamline the onboarding experience for new users" and simplify the process of setting up a new server. Bugs have been fixed, audio and video capacity has been increased, reliability and performance remain Discord's "top priority," and the recently launched "Safety Center" is in place to make users aware of the rules and available tools for dealing with unwelcome interactions

Also, the "Safety Center" has been established to make users aware of the rules and tools available to deal with unwelcome interactions.

There are also some more ostensible changes that are more obvious: Discord's website has changed, discordapp.com has been discontinued, and discord.com has been added. The tagline has also changed, becoming "Your place to talk." Also, "jokes and references" in the software are no longer game-specific, "to allow everyone to join in the fun and make Discord more welcoming."

Discord's expanded ambitions make sense given the ongoing COVID-19 craze that has brought conferencing software like Zoom to the forefront of mainstream consciousness. Discord also increased its limit on streaming viewers from 10 to 50 in March to accommodate increased demand.

While not being able to open multiple channel windows at the same time is unlikely to be frustrating, overall Discord is a very simple and solid application, and if it can shed its "gamers only" image, it would be an ideal time for it to go mainstream.