The only group I have seen care about iMessage colors and see it as a status symbol is high schoolers. Once I got to college, no one cared.
People just wanted to be able to talk easily. It was annoying to set up cross platform group messaging at first, but it hasn't been a problem for at least 6 years. The biggest thing pulling people to iMessage now is convenience and not wanting to figure out a different mutual platform.
A large portion of the current generation of kids are actually tied to Discord. I expect Discord to start dominating more and more as time goes on. Hackathons are organized and held on there. Clubs at my university have moved to Discord. There's a specific to my university Math discord and a separate CS one where even teachers interact. A lot of online streamers have set up their own branded discord for their community. I have heard some companies like Amazon even have a new hire Discord. Slack, iMessage, Whatsapp, and Messenger all lack things Discord provides.
I believe Discord is the endgame for group messaging. The way you can organize conversations in to categories and channels is a killer feature that no other service gets quite right. The way Discords use roles to help categorize people into groups and have granular permission control for who can access what content is so useful. It's a matter of when, not if Discord is the best service.
There is one big caveat to Discord right now and that's the lack of End to End encryption. Whatsapp and Signal are the only two messaging services I trust for privacy sensitive communication. I don't really care if government agencies snoop on the fact that I was playing Rocket League for the last two hours though. iMessage is E2E as well but only if you communicate with others that are also tied to the Apple ecosystem which makes it useless for me because a lot of my international friends aren't. I have an ipad that has my contacts synced so I can see who else has iMessage.
This can help a lot with adoption by “lame-sensitive” users. Snapchat’s confusing and unintuitive design kept “lame” parents, teachers, managers, etc off the platform and helped maintain a kind of exclusivity.
Discord still has that. Instagram is currently losing it. Skype once had it, but has long since lost it.
A platform that figures out how to be cool and stay cool will reap many benefits.
I'm not sure if I agree that's a valid disadvantage of using Discord though. The basic features of Discord are very easily to learn and you only come across the more complex features by needing to use them. I personally find IRC to be more complex to understand properly for a beginner. Being complex is anti-apple in terms of philosophy but I believe that it gives more usability in the long term.
Discord lacks multi account feature on mobile (some desktop support had come recently). It enforces use my "gamer" profile to all other community. Slack did it well from very beginning.
I have to disagree, I can setup a profile and name per discord. I strongly dislike Slack's method of having different accounts tied to a single email but each can potentially have a different password. I hate having to switch and log out and log into different Slacks and there's no clear way to see an overview of all of the ones I am in efficiently. It feels like a UX thing more than a functionality thing. Discord's UX for managing notifications and what communities I'm part of is very pleasant.
I am only a "gamer" in the gaming related Discords. There's no cross talk between two Discords unless the other people also share in being a part of both communities. People in a music related discord don't ask about the game I am playing unless they happen to be interested in it.
People just wanted to be able to talk easily. It was annoying to set up cross platform group messaging at first, but it hasn't been a problem for at least 6 years. The biggest thing pulling people to iMessage now is convenience and not wanting to figure out a different mutual platform.
A large portion of the current generation of kids are actually tied to Discord. I expect Discord to start dominating more and more as time goes on. Hackathons are organized and held on there. Clubs at my university have moved to Discord. There's a specific to my university Math discord and a separate CS one where even teachers interact. A lot of online streamers have set up their own branded discord for their community. I have heard some companies like Amazon even have a new hire Discord. Slack, iMessage, Whatsapp, and Messenger all lack things Discord provides.
I believe Discord is the endgame for group messaging. The way you can organize conversations in to categories and channels is a killer feature that no other service gets quite right. The way Discords use roles to help categorize people into groups and have granular permission control for who can access what content is so useful. It's a matter of when, not if Discord is the best service.
There is one big caveat to Discord right now and that's the lack of End to End encryption. Whatsapp and Signal are the only two messaging services I trust for privacy sensitive communication. I don't really care if government agencies snoop on the fact that I was playing Rocket League for the last two hours though. iMessage is E2E as well but only if you communicate with others that are also tied to the Apple ecosystem which makes it useless for me because a lot of my international friends aren't. I have an ipad that has my contacts synced so I can see who else has iMessage.