Ask HN: Revive a mostly dead Discord server

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?

discord is still great if it's handled well. I'd start by DM'ing a few of my active users and asking what they actually want from the server now what topics, formats, or activities they'd find valuable. that feedback alone can guide your direction.

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.

Excuse my ignorance, but you can set up your own Discord server? I thought it‘s a SaaS kind of offering.

- 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

Archive all the other channels that are not the main and go back to the main first few. Change the theming as in if you are using emojis in channel name, swap to another batch.

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".

I would convert it to a Discourse forum.

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.

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