Musings about Discord servers
Date published: 2024.09.12
This entry has been copy-pasted from Cohost, where it was originally posted.
As someone who has moderated multiple discord servers in the past and even was the owner of one, all of which ended up dying sooner or later, sometimes quietly and sometimes very loudly, we have a tendency to be cautious about how the servers we join are ran. We can smell certain red flags from a mile away.
Most medium-to-small-sized servers (not counting enormous ones here, since they... don't feel like proper communities to us. they're places you go to for a game dev announcement or to shout into the void knowing nobody gives a shit about you there. anyway) are not ran correctly, which makes sense since discord allows anybody to create a server. Most people are not made for the job (I can ensure you that we aren't either) & don't know what they're doing. There are a FUCKTON of mistakes waiting to be made, some of which we can't even think of, some of which are not even avoidable. But some are.
I guess what I'm leading up to is that there is one rule that absolutely needs to be paid attention to in an open server (and not just like, a private one for close friends, obviously). The ONE rule. You don't want cliques to form. Especially with the mods involved. You're creating an open server: you need to ensure new members will feel welcome, or at the very least not feel like they're a stranger who's unwanted there and intruding on the space of a smaller group of friends.
That's it. Sure, there are other things, like having multiple mods (yes, even if it's a small server. yes, even if there are only like, 20 people. trust me, you will need help moderating that place) or balancing the line between having too many rules and not enough rules, between server members feeling overwhelmed by them and bad faith actors becoming unkickable, etc. etc... But that's actually difficult to do. It's difficult to find the correct approach, the right middle ground.
On the other hand, the aforementioned rule of "dear god do not let your server become cliquey" is something so simple and yet something so many servers struggle with. It's easy to do. It's so easy to do! And yet.
If an open server feels actively hostile to new users, you fucked up, the server will die and at best become a place only for your friends to hang out in. (Which is cool, but if you created an open server, that's clearly not what you had in mind.) If the server in question has only recently been created and it already is cliquey - speaking from experience here, as one of the servers we ran was created by a group of friends and dear god did we not put in enough effort to actually treat outsiders well - then just... I'm sorry, but it will either crash and burn so fast you'll barely have the time to blink, or it'll be an extremely toxic cesspool people go to to feel bad. Or both. (It was both in our case.)
I'm not really writing all of this for any actual reason; the cohost exodus and my own urge to "just go and create a server" made me think about our past experiences & things we keep seeing happen in discord servers over and over again. Being a server mod is a terrible, thankless job, and being a system owner is even worse. I get it. That's why I'm never doing that shit again.
Written by: Anika 🪡