Discord has announced a massive increase to server size, to the point that it might be hard to believe a server will ever reach the new maximum capacity. Discord receives regular updates introducing new features and bug fixes, but this one is particularly impressive.
Back in July, Discord released an update that made a big change to the number of users who could fit in a server. Before the July 7 update, Discord servers were capped at 500,000 users, but the update changed that limit to a whopping 2.5 million. While this would be more than enough for the vast majority of servers hosted on Discord, it seems the company wasn't done yet with server size.
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Discord Greatly Expands Server Capacity
On September 3, Discord announced a new update that made a number of technical adjustments, bug fixes, and added new features. While most of these will likely be well-received by the community, the server size change is what's surprised users the most. As of this update, Discord now allows 25 million users to occupy a single server on the platform. Many game fandoms would easily fit within that limit, even if every player were to join a single server dedicated to said game. For example, two of Ubisoft's best-selling games, Assassin's Creed Valhalla and Far Cry 5, came close, but didn't quite reach 25 million sales. As an alternate example, the new capacity means the combined population of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway could all fit on a single Discord server with some room to spare. This increase could be a big deal for developers incorporating Discord directly into games.
While the vast majority of servers will never come close to this limit, the achievement is a technical marvel that likely required a lot of work on the backend to accomplish. Discord says that stability improvements have been made to batched server updates and asynchronous operations to "enhance performance for very large servers." The platform has come a very long way since its roots of Discord being a hobby project for Final Fantasy 11 players to communicate more readily with one another.
In addition to the server adjustments, Discord has added some new features and changes that may be of interest to users. This includes improvements to how the Android app works on older and lower-end devices, improvements to the Discord Shop on mobile to bring it in line with the desktop experience, new server permission options for pinning messages, and a sound effect for when a user's camera turns on or off, which should improve privacy.