Ask HN: Revive a mostly dead Discord server

WorldMaker · 2026-01-20T23:16:51 1768951011

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?

vivzkestrel · 2026-01-21T03:09:23 1768964963

- 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

poolnoodle · 2026-01-20T23:00:40 1768950040

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.

Sohcahtoa82 · 2026-01-20T23:17:38 1768951058

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.

eukara · 2026-01-20T23:33:45 1768952025

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!

orbital-decay · 2026-01-21T03:59:02 1768967942

>1 owner logging everything.

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

anonym29 · 2026-01-21T04:02:20 1768968140

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

dfajgljsldkjag · 2026-01-21T04:12:06 1768968726

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.