This is a story that started back in 2022, but I think its a perfect time to reflect on the impact that it has had on my friend group still to this day.
A year or so before COVID, our friend group dispersed across the world - I moved to Vancouver, one friend moved to the UK and another one moved to the United States. The rest of them still lived in Melbourne.
Once COVID hit, like many others, we looked to find a way to keep in contact and still hang out. We have always been a big gaming group (both board game & video games) so moving online seemed like a logical choice. We had always used Discord so we started to ramp up our time there.
The problem
Over the next year, our group chat (in Signal) was drowning in notifications. A mix of general chit chat, talks on the ever changing news of COVID and the most important - when can people play games and chat. It really annoyed me when people would post on "hey anyone wanna play [game] in 15 mins?", for it to be buried in another 5 messages. The message would have to be constantly bumped in Signal before we eventually jumped in a voice chat in our Discord server. My friends were also annoyed that they didn't know we were playing a certain game tonight, for us to go "we talked about it on Signal!". Something had to change.
The solution
I thought, rather than people typing in Signal that they want to play a game in Discord, it would be better for Discord to notify us when someone has joined a voice channel in our server. Now you're probably thinking "Daniel, wouldn't this just be another notification that people would miss?" - you would be right to be skeptical, but I thought that since it was a distinct notification from Discord rather than Signal it would be better.
I went to Discord to find a setting to send a notification to the server when someone joined a voice channel, and I came up with crickets. There was no such thing. Eventually I found that you can write a Discord bot to leverage the on_voice_state_update from discord.py, a Discord API wrapper. So I spun up a new git repo and got to work writing a simple Discord bot. Here is main guts of the bot.
Even I am staggered on how much we use Discord. Our sessions varies a lot from 5-30 mins to nights of multi-hour gaming sessions. All of my friends are in their 30s and with a few of us being first-time Dads. Being one of those Dad's - it was a life savior when my little one was a newborn to jump onto Discord for even 5 minutes to chat with my friends, watch someone play a game and then log off for another diaper change. Our group has gone from primarily text-based chat to chatting on Discord most nights - it's reminiscent of picking up the landline back in the 90s and calling your friends.
Every year we have an annual Christmas party for our friends and since last year I've been doing a 'Discord Wrapped' (cross with the Dundies from the Office) - where I announce who has joined Discord the most as well as providing each person with stats around their year on Discord. It's been such a fun way to recap the year and see trends of our activity.
Conclusion & what's next
I didn't realize the impact this would have on our group, but I'm very grateful I had a few hours to spare one Sunday to quickly whip this Discord bot up.
I plan to add achievements based on who you hung out on Discord and some other fun ideas, as well as tracking when you left Discord to get those juicy hours spent stats.
I also had this idea to turn this into an IoT device that has 5 RGB lights and sits on your desk. It would light up when each friend you have delegated joins your Discord voice channel and you could customize the colour for each friend. If I get some traction I might turn it into a real product, so email me at my email address in my about page if that seems something you'd like.
