Creating a Discord Server

Logan Jory

2 min read

Best Practice

2 Nov 2022

If you want to create a community on Discord, it starts with launching a server.

Assuming you know your target audience, you'll want to create a space for them that's either useful or fun to be in. For instance, an NFT analytics tool would focus on having useful data points, news and opinions whereas a brand would focus more around creating a fun or engaging place to be.

So, before you put feelers out , you'll need to create some:

Roles
Channels
Bots

Here's what you need to consider when structuring your community at the start:

⚡️ Onboarding When someone lands on your server, what information is available to them? Ideally this is just one channel: a verification channel to serve as a CAPTCHA to prevent bot attacks.

That person, once verified, receives a role that allows them to see other channels.

You could choose to open it up in stages to explain your project slowly, or open up the whole server so they can look around for themselves.

⚡️ Nurturing Generally, people contribute. But to kick this into gear, consider role progression for completing certain things like inviting people in, chatting lots, or winning competitions you set.

It's nice for people to know that what they put in, they will get out in the form of rewards like early access, idea generation, admin rights or even a mod role.

In terms of channels, keep these focused and active. If there are channels with not much activity in, you've opened too many. Open another for a topic that keeps coming up in your main chat. I see a lot of dead channels on servers where the admin feels like they want to drive a community in a certain direction.

Your role is to guide and react, rather than impose.

There are thousands of different Discord bots that allow you to run games, collect information, improve security, improve user experience and even drop random Dad jokes into the server every day – the key is to start with: