Discord, Success, and Community
Fame, Fortune, Success… just another good day.
Oh god, another Discord article. Shame, already started my rant. Have you ever wanted to run a successful Discord community? Have you ever thought “it’s too hard” or “where do I start?” If so, keep on reading!
I wrote this to discuss what works, and what doesn’t, in sustaining a community! Community management isn’t easy, all of us who have built bigger communities know this; finding the right mods, adding/removing channels as needed, website stuff (if you decide to have one), and finding the right bots time after time.
None of this is easy, but the more you do it the more natural it becomes.
What is the true key to success? The answer is the appeal.

Your own special community
Don’t we all want a little slice of heaven to call ours?
What is it you’re passionate about? What could you do for hours on end? What do you love? What feels right to do?
Are you an Artist? Techie? Developer? maybe a Singer? There’s places for all of you!
Fun fact; The nicest servers tend to be the smallest. The small friend communities where everyone knows each other and they talk for hours about random stuff, have nice game nights and plan movies (even all online, yes!) are the best communities I ever get to be part of.
The ability for everyone to bond and know each other makes everyone feel included and everyone’s comfortable to invite their good friends who they think might enjoy it.
Where a lot of people go wrong is they decide to randomly make a community for something; which is good for nice small communities. This isn’t usually good anymore if you want a large server. Servers usually require support or backing to get big, as well as a lot of practice.
Every day what we considered as a “big” or “active” server ends up changing. We now see Discord servers with over 100k members, not just one but multiple. How is any server supposed to have those same numbers? 20k online? 70k total? How would a server even get close to those numbers?
There are actually multiple answers to your questions;
- Passion
- Organization
- Appeal
- Advertisement
With these 4 core things you can, in time, muster a large, active, and friendly server, and maybe have some fun along the way.
So where are people going wrong?
You might be thinking “But we have passion, we seem organized, and we advertise. What more can we do?” well, it’s a bit more complicated than that.
See, you may have some of these or be doing them certain ways but a lot of ways to go about things that used to work don’t anymore. A lot of tricks and tools will help you get member numbers, but frequently won’t get you activity or sustain itself and things die out.
The number one thing people are getting wrong… members = activity.
This isn’t accurate, and you pushing for people to “invite all their friends” and getting a ton of dead accounts because you dropped advertisements on the sites/servers for it isn’t going to help.
This is where “appeal” comes in, if your server is a really good community it’ll attract members. Pushing for people to invite their friends here and there and using those sites/servers is ok, but assuming that everyone who joins will be active would be lying to yourself.
Time to do this thing right
So how do I make a quality community..? One that lasts?
Start with what you should do. It’s important to know what things you should have and focus on. Did you fully setup role and channel permissions? That’s a common thing people skip over. Do you have a rules/announcements channel?
How a server looks to a user joining is 70% of what decides if they stay or not. Do you remember joining your first server? What did it look like? How would you want a server to look if you joined one? Always build your server to be presentable and built around the users you want.
Now, what you shouldn’t do… Most people like to consider what they should do, but avoid what they shouldn’t do. There’s a lot of bad, or lazy, practices that can take a server down at the knees early on.
What roles are hoisted (shown on the sidebar)? Join messages? Those can be pretty irritating if there’s nothing important in them. Do you help protect against DM advertisers?
Protecting your members, helping the community revolve around them, and being real with them is what builds a stronger community.
There’s a lot of tools and bots for community management and guild organizing, and even more for just having fun. No need to be serious all the time.
Here are a few questions for you.
What is your community about?
Is there another community like it?
What makes you different from that community?
What are your members like?
Why did you make it?
Did you want friends and a fun time? or did you want to run something big?
If someone knew why you did it, would they want to join?
How your community looks to others tends to decide how well you do.
Things you can do
Make friends on other servers, invite them if they want to join.
Use server listing sites/servers.
Build a strong community that invites its friends.
Things I’d personally avoid
DM advertising to random users.
Partnering up with servers just for members.
Going for just having a big member count, not activity.
Just keep in mind, what are your goals and what do others like? Every community should be based on the interests of the people you want to be in it. Build a server/community for someone else, not specifically for yourself.
But I’m not one to judge how you want to live your life, your choice.
Just think, what do you want to really achieve? And don’t forget, staffing existing servers and reviving old servers is a thing. Try it sometime.

Image credits to Discord.
