I want to fight enshitification.. But its hard.
To this day, I’d still meet the increased requirements for Discord Partner if only the program hadn’t been shut down entirely in October 2023.
Over the past year, I’ve grown to have a really skeptical view of Discord. Don’t get me wrong I really like the platform and the features it offers. Back when it launched, it was instrumental in turning this weird hobby of mine into an actual career.
When Discord first went into beta, I wasn’t super interested in using the platform. In fact, I didn’t even make my server an acquaintance of mine did, and then handed me ownership a few months later. I wasn’t in the beta and couldn’t create a server, but he was. I started using Discord so early that I had to explain it to my chat: “It’s just like Slack, but mixed with IRC and TeamSpeak,” was a sentence I said a lot during that era. The server grew slowly and steadily.
In 2018, I earned Discord Partner status. That was a big deal for me personally it opened a lot of doors to networking events, I got free stuff, and the server received a bunch of exclusive perks. To this day, earning Discord Partner when I did is something I’m proud of and remember fondly. But no matter how many positive associations I have with the platform, it’s far from perfect. Remember when Discord tried to compete with Steam and sell games?
Yeah, they did, it even had exclusives. Bad North was one of them. It was a small FTL-like experience where you command little armies of Vikings in battle. I really enjoyed it, and it ended up selling well once it made its way to other platforms.
Honestly, I’m not even sure how I ended up with most of those games. I think they were either free, or I was given keys at some point.
In 2021, Discord shut down the storefront and removed the ability for people to buy or release games for sale. The store itself kind of stuck around, though just in a different format.
This is what it became—profile images and themes. Honestly, I have zero issue with that kind of thing existing.
Discord also offers “Server Subscriptions.” This one’s odd to me, because from what I can tell, I can’t even see the feature unless I turn on a VPN. I know someone, somewhere, must be using it, but it doesn’t seem to be widespread at all.
The last thing Discord offers is “Turbo” something I grumble about paying for, mostly because it used to be something I got for free when I was a Discord Partner. That program was shut down entirely a few years ago. Discord Partners provided a ton of free marketing for the platform. They gave us merch, all the Turbo features, helped organize networking events, and were honestly one of the best companies to work with from a content creator’s perspective. Then they ramped up the requirements heavily. You could even lose your partnership if your server became too inactive.
My server was borderline at the time, so I created a channel where members were encouraged to count to a million in sequence, one person at a time. It was silly, but it kept the activity levels high and gave the community something fun to do. In December 2022, my Discord server ballooned in size when Dwarf Fortress launched on Steam jumping from 800 members to 2,700 almost overnight. That was a massive deal for me, and the server easily cleared the activity thresholds to stay in the Partner program.
To this day, I’d still meet the increased requirements for Discord Partner if only the program hadn’t been shut down entirely in October 2023. Discord remains a crucial part of my work and business as it is for many people across a variety of industries. But now, their CEO is talking about possibly taking the company public.
Samuel Axon
This scares me.
I’ve been a bit miffed for a while now—first over the changes to the Partnership program, and then over the addition of features that felt half-baked or poorly conceived. I pay for Discord’s premium features. I was an early adopter. I watched the platform grow into what it is today. And now, I’m afraid of what pressure for growth from shareholders could do to the platform I’ve relied on for so long. It’s gotten me looking at alternatives. The one I’ve looked into the most is Matrix. It’s a bit more fiddly than Discord and some of the other corporate platforms, but it’s incredibly flexible—kind of like what Mastodon is to Twitter. Matrix even has some really cool community-focused features, like bridges. These let you link a Discord server with a Matrix server using a bot, allowing a Matrix "Space" to communicate seamlessly with users in a Discord server.
Matrix also has a bunch of different clients to choose from, each with its own look and feel. Some even offer enhanced privacy features. The default recommended client is Element, but other popular ones include FluffyChat and Cinny—the last of which is almost identical to Discord in how it operates. All of this is free, with optional encryption, and fully decentralized.
The issue? Bridging a Discord server to any other service using a bot breaks Discord’s Terms of Service. It could get your server deleted.
Discord Bridge example.
The last thing I want to do is break off a huge chunk of the community I’ve built over the past decade. That idea honestly scares me. I’m watching Discord slowly get worse—making more room for ads, tweaking the UI in ways that feel less user-focused. The recent UI overhaul made things more modular, which feels like it's designed to open up even more space for monetization. Aside from a few grandfathered features I was allowed to keep from being a Discord Partner, everything else has either been hidden or revoked. And it’s starting to make me sad. I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. The only logical path forward that I can see is to start building a server on another platform quietly, slowly. Invite people little by little. Not to replace Discord immediately, but to have a backup in place. If (or when) Discord goes public and starts becoming more aggressively money-hungry, I’ll stop paying for Nitro and focus on building around a more user-friendly service.
Maybe I’m just being paranoid. But I don’t even have Spotify installed on my computer, and yet—it pops up every time I launch Discord.
Schedule.
I started a new fort last Thursday. But Headpunch is still alive and running. I'll be playing the new fortress Tuesday - Thursday and I'll pick up headpunch on friday for a shorter stream as we plug away at the long end game. Starsector will happen in the evenings when I have extra enthusiasm.
and as always. Thanks for reading.