Discord

Discord is a voice, video, and text chat platform that launched in 2015 as a gaming communication tool. It’s since sprawled well beyond gaming into education, business, and every flavor of community space, including a large contingent of adult creators, kink communities, and sex educators who use it to build audiences and connect with members directly. Its relationship with those communities has been bumpy. The platform’s age verification rollout drew serious backlash over privacy and the burden it dumped on smaller NSFW servers. Discord then delayed the rollout and admitted it had “made mistakes,” but not before a data breach exposed tens of thousands of government IDs users had submitted through its verification system, a fairly predictable outcome of asking people to hand over their passports to a chat app. With over 150 million monthly active users, Discord remains one of the most widely used tools for community building, but its handling of adult content keeps raising the question of whether it’s a safe long-term home for sex-positive spaces.