I’ve been on Discord for a long time. Since 2016, even.

Though now, I think I’d like to use something else as my primary form of communication. I’m unsure what exactly, maybe Revolt? Element? I’ll be needing a new digital home for that.

What spurred this post in the first place was a change to their username policy, a horribly, horribly miscommunicated and terribly executed change. This seems to be a common theme with them, lately, and doesn’t give me any confidence to keep staying around them.

On May 3rd, when the initial change was announced, an announcement was put in the Discord Partners server with the following tucked in there:

Since you’re a Partner and an important community leader, we’ll be rolling this update out to you earlier. When you’re eligible to change your old username and claim a new username, you’ll be notified in-app.

Fast forward to today with no clarification on the change at all (to nobody, not even Discord Partners), the update releases, and everyone swiftly find out they cannot use the username they want, for some ungodly reason.

Many usernames are already taken. I’ve tried @re, @ren, @lapis, and all were taken. This was never said to be the case (outside of the announcement they put that partners can claim usernames), so I have waited for a shorter username for nothing.

Now that’s all well and good, I still have @renavi, but half of the Partner server themselves cannot seem to get their own usernames. This especially matters as half of the server represents brands, people representing themselves, and are unable to do so because of Discord’s arbitrary whim that we don’t even know, as they wont talk.

It’s only now I understand why some people are so distrusting of corporations. They really aren’t your friends, even when you are a “Partner”, quote unquote. All those years ago, I never thought that Discord would end up like YouTube of all companies.

Unresponsive, and enigmantic to get a hold of.

I’ll be moving to something more open source eventually, at least there changes aren’t done arbitrarily, or to please investors.

tl;dr: The FOSS crowd was right. More at 11.

This post was edited to fix a minor spelling error.