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.
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?
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.
- 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
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.
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...
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.
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".
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...
Related, one can host separate search index/public frontend for a Discord server with Answer Overflow https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36383773
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.
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.
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!
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.
Maybe making a new Discord and migrating to that could achieve the desired effects, but it's hard to say without more context.
