Discord is rapidly expanding beyond gaming, attracting suitors like Sony and Microsoft - CNBC

This is why when she discovered Discord, an online chat service, Delilah decided to create her own Discord server specifically for fans of "The Bachelor" and other dating shows. .

Discord offers some advanced features that make these servers more akin to online communities than simple chat rooms, including real-time audio and video conversations, custom emoji, and custom roles that distinguish users.

The moderators of the San Francisco & Bay Area server also organize game nights, where they play games like Among Us or Catan, as well as movie nights, where they stream a movie and chat about it in the server's chat rooms. .

One way the San Francisco & Bay Area server stands apart is by allowing users to assign roles to themselves.

That's the case for David "Tart" Rush and his fellow moderators who built the Fantasy Football Chat server. .

Like the San Francisco & Bay Area server, Rush's server was also a spinoff from a Reddit community.

But Rush's server offers fantasy football players the ability to have conversations in real-time more easily than they could through comment threads on Reddit. .

The moderators of the Fantasy Football Chat server have built a number of bots that can recognize when the server's members talk about specific players and pull up relevant information, like a player's most recent stats or information about their NFL contract.

These advanced features have helped Fantasy Football Chat attract more than 8,000 users since its creation in 2018, but all that growth has kept Rush and his fellow moderators busy.

Besides building bots and recruiting fantasy experts to come do ask-me-anything sessions in the server, Rush and his peers also have to moderate the server to keep things civil. ?

With those guardrails in place, Fantasy Football Chat has become more than a hobby for Rush, the other moderators and many of the server's members

Although they discuss fantasy football as their primary topic, the server's side rooms allow them to build relationships beyond their common interest

That's the exact type of vibe that Hurl, a gamer in San Francisco, was going for when he built his server, aptly titled Smash Pub

That's the viewpoint that Michael of the San Francisco & Bay Area server is taking as he sees more of his members getting together in real life after meeting first on Discord