Plenty of people more eloquent than me have discussed the precarity of Discord as an alternative for storing documentation, and about the consecuences of its implosion cutting people off from their loved ones with whom they can't keep in touch outside of corporate social silos. I agree, and though I still use Discord (it's hard to find a suitable setup for simultaneous voice chat and text chat that isn't fully ephemeral), I change accounts often and do a monthly backup of the chat logs I hold dear.
I live in a state where the awareness that all things I love can disappear in a moment due to a company's whim, but for a moment I forgot that sometimes my whims also mess with my relationships online. This week both issues intersected, and I'm still recovering.
I am an admin in a small Discord server where I chat with a group of online friends almost constantly, every day. The conversations are spontaneous and long, which leads to the making of a lot of channels, threads and forum posts to keep conversation flow going and not interfere with others' ongoing topics. Up until my fuckup, we had over 70 channels, including the aforementioned subchannel types.
Discord and Tumblr own the spaces where I spend most of my time online these days and everyone who knows me is aware that I don't like that they're centralized and private, and that leads to a sense of existential discomfort that often has me with a million accounts in different alternative sites trying to get everyone to join me and then migrating accounts until I lose interest, inevitably, and go back to my two archnemeses because that's where my friends are, and the part that was broken is not something that just moving services will solve.
In one of these states of restlessness, I locked my friends out of all channels and started a restructuring, which consisted in pruning the channels that were inactive and merging those who were but covered similar topics. I still exported everything and shared the files in case anyone wanted to archive the conversations that were no longer in the server, but that was the wrong move, and I upset my friends. I've spent the past couple of days being eaten away by guilt, even while dreaming.
A friend of mine brought up that browsing the files on mobile was comparatively inaccessible to using the Discord search function and backreading, and a few others agreed. As a primarily-computer user, this accessibility concern had not occurred to me and that sucks! Phones and tablets nowadays are generally cheaper, as are data plans, and have become the primary way for a lot of folks to interact with the internet, especially disabled and poor communities. Not everyone has the tools to browse certain file formats comfortably, or even sites not equipped with an app version. That's infuriating, and while it's not my friends' (or any user's) fault, it's a reality that I have to learn to accept and plan accordingly.
Ultimately, my screw-up was not technical, it was social. In not taking the time to talk it through with my friends and find the most accessible way to keep the server manageable, I broke their trust and made it difficult for them to engage in conversation. I didn't honor the community, I acted just like Discord as a company would in my worst nightmares -- shutting down the ties that bind my loved ones together without warning.
I want to be better, and right now I don't know how. The guilt is all-consuming and blinding, and growth seems light years away. I need to get over myself so that I can be a better friend.