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Ask HN: Revive a mostly dead Discord server
Hello :-)
I have a Discord server I set up a long time ago. Around 2016 I think. Back then, it was lively and active and loads of fun. Over time it's developed close to 5,000 members (it actually had over 5,000 members at one point) and currently has 501 members online as I type this. It's more likely there's about 10-15 that are paying attention to anything happening.
It's a Discord that originally focused on DevOps. It complemented my YouTube channel on the same topic, but since then, as it's slowly died out, and my channel's focus as shifted and changed, it's become a bit of a waste land.
It's a shame really, because a really fun Discord server can be a great place to be, but I'm not sure where to take it now.
How would you handle this situation? What would be your approach to reviving the Discord and perhaps trying to get a community of like minded hackers going again in 2026?
I won't link the Discord here as I'm not trying to beg for users or spam. I just genuinely want to work on a solution to improve the life of the server. I will put it in my HN profile, though, so if you do want to check it out that extra step is required.
Are people even interested in Discord servers any more? I don't know.
Thanks in advance.
If your YouTube channel was the galvanizing "complement", it may be that the Discord's usefulness shifted when your channel focus did. You could potentially find ways to better complement the new focus of the channel and see if that brings new excitement to your Discord. (Are there enough channels for your shifted focus? Are you posting your videos to them? Do people have things to say about the new focus?)
Most of what keeps a Discord active or not is content and having things to chat about. You list things in an order that suggests the chat started to slowly die and then your channel's focus shifted, but maybe it was the other way around and not as much as of the audience that had found their way through the Discord followed you through the channel refocus as you expected?
I would convert it to a Discourse forum.
Excuse my ignorance, but you can set up your own Discord server? I thought it‘s a SaaS kind of offering.
"server" in Discord terms just means a community space with channels. You don't actually run any sort of "server" software, it's all managed by Discord.
Just use their internal terminology and call them guilds. “servers” are a stupid marketing label for a thing they aren’t.
They thought that the word "server" was not overloaded enough.
- Slightly veering off the topic here, to anyone reading this, I wanted to ask. I am thinking of starting a discord server for my SaaS
- The idea is to have a bugs channel that works like a forum (remember that new discord forum Q/A feature) where people come and post Q/A about bugs aka issues (SaaS is not open source)
- A feedback channel where people can submit feedback, paste screenshots, (not sure if links should be allowed here)
- What kind of tools, bots do you recommend so that it doesnt get overloaded with junk, spam or worse porn and crypto stuff
you can use a multipurpose bot like sapphire https://sapph.xyz for moderation, anti-spam, logging, and automations.
to reduce junk, spam stuff you could try adding onboarding/verification questions before granting access also can se AutoMod + keyword/link filters and rate-limit new users
this won’t remove 100% of spam but it'll drastically reduce it some manual moderation will still be needed.
I absolutely despise Discord for anything more than a couple of friends chatting. It is the worst way to have discussions with a large group of people that I can think of because you have to wade through so many junk messages to read anything of interest.
Discord can be great when people treat it properly. That is, treat it as IRC for the modern age, rather than a replacement for forums.
Just like in IRC, you probably don't care about most messages. You don't need to be in every conversation. But it can be a great way to just jump into a live conversation or start a new one.
Just like IRC. Except 1 giant server, 1 owner logging everything. Don't ask how it sustains itself though. It still doesn't. People let their guard down in such lax environments and many even run their entire business comms on an unencrypted app as a result too. People should know better.
In a lot of ways, this is a major regression as far as security and redundancy is concerned.
There's also the good old saying: Don't build your castle in somebody else's Kingdom. Bot developers definitely learned that recently. I don't have a lot of pity for bot developers though as many are truly, in fact, scraping data and doing other undocumented things with it (Spy Pet wasn't and won't be the only one). All I'm going to say on the matter!
>1 owner logging everything.
Everything in Discord is also filtered through a classifier or a generative model, so their provider also has access.
> Discord can be great when people treat it properly. That is, treat it as IRC for the modern age, rather than a replacement for forums.
For certain needs, like support, forums are abysmal too. See Unraid as an example. Got a problem? Drill through ten different 20-page long discussions with no clear answer.
Make a Matrix server, tell the stragglers on Discord to migrate.
As much as I hate Discord this is not the way. Matrix is pretty dead and only a fraction of your potential audience would even try to make an account and fewer would succeed.
Maybe making a new Discord and migrating to that could achieve the desired effects, but it's hard to say without more context.