The Discord Experts from Peter Stindberg is one of the very most popular new-ish Second Life brands in my reader survey, and that's no surprise: As the name suggests, it connects Second Life to Discord, the most popular messaging app for gamers worldwide. (Now with 150 million monthly active users, according to the company's own stats.) While Linden Lab hasn't yet launched an official SL-to-Discord API, Peter has been adding numerous bridging applications to his Marketplace, including the one above: An add-on which enables you to track visitors on your Second Life region from Discord.
Already quite popular (more info down the way), the Discord Experts brand began in 2019/2020 by happenstance, Peter tells me:
Stinberg at the Rome-themed SLB exhibit
"My group of friends used Google Chat to stay in touch outside of Second Life, but Google dropped some hints about 5 years ago that they might drop it. So we switched to Discord -- like many others from SL."
Conversant in LSL and other languages, a friend asked him about creating a Discord/SL bridge.
"So I dug into the developer doc, found it very straightforward, and made my first clumsy prototype. It would have stayed like that, hadn't said friend (Hi Charri!) insisted I finish it and put it on the Marketplace. I thought that maybe 10-20 people would have a use for it."
As of this week, there are over 10,000 Discord Expert units in Second Life.
About half of this 10,000 are a base model given out for free during SL events and such, to be sure, but thousands of SLers have gone on to buy various modular add-ons. Many more SLers use them, of course:
"There's three main areas where it gets used," Peter tells me, when I ask about total usage. "Small groups of friends or SL families, roleplay regions, and shops/real-estate/businesses using it for customer service. Extrapolating from that I would assume that each active instance has about 20 users on average (roleplay communities more, friend circles less), and accounting for double users, there would be about 50,000 active users per month.
"Wow, that sounds a lot," he adds. " I never did the math like this."
Yes: 50,000 is roughly 1 in 10 of the entire Second Life user base. Peter allows it could be much lower than that number, but given the dozens of large SL-themed Discord servers I'm familiar with, I'd say 50,000 is pretty plausible.
But what happens if and when Linden Lab does add official integration?
"Is that on the menu?" Peter asks skeptically. "It would remain to be seen how good it is. My add-on ecosystem offers a LOT of functionality for various use cases which I very much doubt would be possible via an official integration. My products could run in parallel to such an integration, so I guess it would not have a big impact on me."
Then again, he adds grinning, if Linden Lab is interested in talking with him about such a Discord integration, "I have quite some experience and ideas what an official integration could look like. You know where I live."
As for where Peter Stinberg lives on Discord, as you might have guessed, the Discord Experts do indeed have a Discord server here.
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