Discord is happy to ban people for anything. They even stop people for using alternative clients. If you care about your account, do not mess with discord.
I got banned directly after signup. I got an email 1 second after signing up that I violated the community guidelines. The algorithm didn't like my Firefox/uBlock Origin combo I guess. Now my phone number is tainted and I can't make an account anymore. Oh well, no Discord for me I guess. (They really are very trigger-happy.)
All project maintainers: take notes on why your community shouldn’t be built around Discord’s service. Bridge to it only if you must, but don’t make it the primary chat option.
From my experiences discord servers tends to draw people who are least interested in talking about the project and more about casual talk and sharing memes. Most of the time these places feels like an equivalent of shoutbox feature on old forums.
Still, I received more support via discord than forums which on the other hand seems to be mostly full of people who vent their complexes and issues on users and lock discussions for absolutely every single stupid thing, just to show they're in charge.
Perhaps a community has to be small, dedicated, mature and aware enough to use e.g. Matrix or other solutions, leaving running blessed, approved discord servers to communities, various enthusiasts.
There are the anime communities already, so it's not just about projects.
Also, on Discord, you can have pretty serious discussions and organise your projects. But it's never done in #general : you need to create specific rooms where users focus.
The shoutout function is at the heart of the group on Discord.
But Discord won users in the first place by allowing them to create rooms and organize discussions.
It was meant to run projects (if you consider a RPG is a project, but whatever, as long as it works)
And Matrix is currently too heavy to self-host which means relying on Matrix.org (who also controls the spec).
My vote would be an XMPP MUC that’s bridged to IRC. This keeps it lightweight & decentralized. Both of these options could be ran with hundreds or thousands of users on a potato compared to Matrix.
I used gtkcord4, and I didn't get banned. I used Vencord, didn't get banned either. Of course, I wouldn't reccommend using any of these for the saftey of your account, as I was dumb back then and never learned about the risks.
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Also, one Discord alternative I would reccommend is Revolt[1]. Great community, and was famous for being featured in a No Text To Speech video (and my friend's server had a brief cameo too!), and it's adoption of discriminators (i.e. randomguyabcd#5408).
From the README of Vencord, one of the most popular mods:
> Client modifications are against Discord’s Terms of Service.
However, Discord is pretty indifferent about them and there are no known cases of users getting banned for using client mods! So you should generally be fine as long as you don’t use any plugins that implement abusive behaviour. But no worries, all inbuilt plugins are safe to use [...]
I have definitely known people be banned for "selfbots" (and I mean personal utility ones, not actually using a user account as a public service account), however they were almost always doing something unwise and conspicuous, like spamming username change requests for "animations", or showing it off in the API server literally in front of a Discord dev