Ask HN: Revive a mostly dead Discord server

Posted by movedx 4 days ago

Counter20Comment28OpenOriginal

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.

Comments

Comment by WorldMaker 4 days ago

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?

Comment by thisisharsh7 3 days ago

discord is still great if it's handled well. I'd start by DM'ing a few of my active users and asking what they actually want from the server now what topics, formats, or activities they'd find valuable. that feedback alone can guide your direction.

also you could also try launching something lightweight but consistent, like a weekly dev/hacker discussion, office hours, or casual show-and-tell. Regular events give people a reason to come back Servers usually don’t die because of Discord they die from lack of purpose. If you redefine that, you can revive it.

Comment by opan 3 days ago

You could do a video on selfhosting one of the free software chat solutions like IRC, XMPP, or Matrix, then move your community there as a way of showing real-world usage. You could then do some update videos later on how performance and maintenance have been. If you go with IRC you could focus specifically on IRCv3 and the modern features it gives you, plus which clients/servers support the new features. I think an audience that likes technology would appreciate this.

Comment by doublerabbit 3 days ago

Archive all the other channels that are not the main and go back to the main first few. Change the theming as in if you are using emojis in channel name, swap to another batch.

Bring something different. Old chat is boring, the new users can't relate, old users shiver at their cringe. Don't delete, archive, make a category called Museum and shove them there. You've got to offer something, a Minecraft server, free money and please get rid of any of those stupid "level up bots".

Comment by vivzkestrel 3 days ago

- 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

Comment by opan 3 days ago

Please do not. Some people do not use Discord and thus will never report bugs or give feedback even if they use your software and would otherwise report bugs for other software.

Something public-facing that uses standard protocols would be ideal. Email, forums, IRC. For bug reports, a web form that doesn't need an account registration would be nice. You want to reduce friction or people will give up partway through the process. Don't mark too many fields as required or try too hard to categorize things either, that's a common misfeature I run into.

Comment by WorldMaker 3 days ago

These days the out-of-the-box automod and autospam prevention tools in Discord are generally good enough you probably don't need third party bots to do it (unless the community gets particularly huge, and even then maybe not). Most bots are now for entertainment more than community management when the Discord is configured right.

The biggest trick to getting access to most of those built-in features is that it needs to be marked as a "Community Server" [1], so expect to put in the effort to meeting those requirements and getting Discord certified on them. Most of them are good practices in general, especially for something you are trying to present as a public, professional face of your company.

Also, I don't think any moderation tools are currently gated behind Server Boosts/Levels, but it may also be worth budgeting for buying a Server Level or two [2]. Most of the reasons to budget for that are marketing and comfort. If you plan to do things like Live Q&A or screensharing events, having the better audio/video capabilities of higher levels can be useful. The custom header for Discord Invites is often a marketing tool to help assuage users seeing the invites that it is indeed the right official community. (Some of the moderation tools were previewed at higher Server Levels, and it does seem like something Discord takes into account when testing various new, desirable features.)

(ETA: Also, automoderation only gets you so far in general, you may still want to budget for the labor of real moderators as well, no matter how good you think you can configure the automod tools.)

[1] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047132851-E...

[2] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360039337992-S...

Comment by thisisharsh7 3 days ago

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.

Comment by dostick 3 days ago

Discord is an abomination. Became popular outside gaming due to some luck, and obviously they dont want to do anything at all to accommodate users. you can’t do formatting, when you see the red badge it’s impossible to navigate to message- the only way is to scroll and scroll, huge waste of time.

Comment by WorldMaker 3 days ago

Discord supports formatting [1]. It's closer to many Markdown implementations like "CommonMark" than Slack's formatting.

Discord also has several ways to jump to specific messages. Navigating from the Inbox/Notifications will jump directly to a message with a "red badge" no matter where it is in the channel.

[1] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/210298617-Mark...

Comment by brookman64k 3 days ago

Excuse my ignorance, but you can set up your own Discord server? I thought it‘s a SaaS kind of offering.

Comment by wavemode 3 days ago

"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.

Comment by joecool1029 3 days ago

Just use their internal terminology and call them guilds. “servers” are a stupid marketing label for a thing they aren’t.

Comment by WorldMaker 3 days ago

To be fair, "servers" came organically from some of the community relatively early on. (One alleged place where it came from was communities migrating from TeamSpeak where "server" was the word there, which would make sense as a particular place it came from given the early focus on game players. Another alleged source was some huge non-technical communities that were also early adopters of Discord.)

I sort of prefer "guilds" for technical reasons, too, and also from enough work on Discord bot development where that terminology is far more common because it is in all the API documentation. But I think a lot of that ship has sailed for non-technical reasons of "it is just how everyone talks about Discord".

(Also, technically Discord does shard the heaviest "guilds" in its server clusters in such a way that the technical resemblance to "server" isn't far off if you want to feel better about the non-technical "server" terminology.)

Comment by Jyaif 3 days ago

They thought that the word "server" was not overloaded enough.

Comment by ivanjermakov 3 days ago

Your own as in manage yes, as in host no.

Related, one can host separate search index/public frontend for a Discord server with Answer Overflow https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36383773

Comment by rcarmo 3 days ago

I would convert it to a Discourse forum.

Comment by lproven 3 days ago

Discourse is less of a PITA than Discord, but only marginally. It's still a fugly web forum.

For productive low-noise discussions, I favour mailing lists. Anyone who can't suss out how to participate on mailing lists probably has little interesting to say.

For a FOSS chatroom, that is, live and realtime, Matrix works fairly well these days. Thunderbird has a built-in Matrix client; no extensions needed.

Comment by poolnoodle 4 days ago

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.

Comment by Sohcahtoa82 4 days ago

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.

Comment by eukara 4 days ago

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!

Comment by orbital-decay 3 days ago

>1 owner logging everything.

Everything in Discord is also filtered through a classifier or a generative model, so their provider also has access.

Comment by thefz 3 days ago

> 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.

Comment by Sohcahtoa82 3 days ago

Alternatively, they tell you "use the search function" despite it being well-known how terrible it is.

Comment by anonym29 3 days ago

Make a Matrix server, tell the stragglers on Discord to migrate.

Comment by dfajgljsldkjag 3 days ago

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.

Comment by anonym29 3 days ago

A growing number of people literate with technology will never use Discord under any circumstances.

Comment by dfajgljsldkjag 3 days ago

There are dozens of them, dozens. Myself included.