Discord is a platform that allows users to create communities for various purposes, such as friends, studying, gaming, building creator businesses, coordinating with colleagues, and promoting brands. To start using Discord, one needs to create an account and set up a new server by choosing a template or starting from scratch, uploading an icon, and setting the server name. Community servers offer additional features for larger-scale community management, such as announcement channels, stage channels, welcome screens, and analytics. Once a server is created, users can manage roles, channels, and permissions to organize their community members' appearance, actions, and access to channels. They can also design a welcome experience, add bots and apps, invite members, and further enhance their server with features like server subscriptions, insights, and boosts.