I’ve been playing with tech like this in various Discord servers for over a year now and I’m still fascinated every day. Knowing how incredible it is and then hearing people say “Sure. But, Discord. Ew.” is a shaking-my-head moment. The Discord interface is far from ideal. But, it has had a very high ROI for the small, low budget team behind Midjourney.
I don't know why. I use the Discord server and don't like it, my messages get lost in the scrollspam and it's just a bad experience. Surely, a text field on the site would have been equally good.
you don't get to see other's images and talk with them in a shared chat channel with that approach (unless they build out a lot more web app). Which is half the fun of it. (Not that hard to build, but more work than a Discord bot.)
I like FPSes but I don't like multiplayer games. So I play single player FPSes, even if they are worse, because multiplayer ones are not fun for me. Craiyon, DALLE 2, and Disco Diffusion all offer a less social and direct interface in the same space as MidJourney and may be better to experiment with until MJ provides some sort of Web interface, as I imagine they will at some point.
I don't care if it's discord or slack or whatsapp or thelatesthypedapp... I even have a discord account, I just don't understand why the author is introducing extra hurdles, stick it on the open web, that's the lowest friction and least platform dependence.