How to Get More Discord Members (Without Fake Ones)

How to get more Discord members who actually stay

To get more Discord members, bring your server to people who already care about its topic: your own audience on YouTube, Twitch, a game, or a website, server listing sites, related communities, partnerships with other servers, and events worth showing up for. Then make the first ten minutes good enough that new members stay. What you should never do is buy members or reward people for joining, because Discord treats that as platform manipulation and can remove the server.

The rest of this guide is the order we would work in: learn the rules, fix the server, pick two or three sources, and measure which of them bring members who are still around a week later.

What Discord allows and forbids when you grow a server

Two official pages cover growth. Discord’s Community Guidelines say not to engage with the service in an inauthentic way, “including artificially inflating server membership, manipulating engagement metrics, and selling artificial engagement services”. They also ban self-bots, unsolicited bulk messages, and selling or buying servers and custom invite links.

The Platform Manipulation Policy explainer is more specific. It defines inauthentic engagement as engagement that is purchased, induced (its example is “promises of financial reward”), fraudulent, or falsified, and lists “purchasing or inducing server joins” among the things you may not do, along with join-for-join schemes and invite reward programs. Its advice is short: grow your server organically and don’t artificially inflate its member count.

The giveaway point is our reading of the policy rather than a line Discord spells out, but a prize for joining is a financial reward for a join, so we would not risk it. Giveaways for people who are already members, judged on things like a build contest or event attendance, avoid the problem.

Paying for advertising is a different thing. When you buy a post on another platform, people see your server and decide for themselves, and nobody is paid to join. The line to hold is simple: money can buy attention, never the join itself.

Fix the server before you promote it

Promotion multiplies whatever is already there. If new members land in twenty empty channels, most of them leave, and every source looks worse than it is. Spend a day on this first:

• Cut the channel list to the few that are actually used. Three busy channels feel alive; fifteen quiet ones feel abandoned.
• Write a short welcome message that says what the server is for, the three rules that matter, and where to post first.
• If you run a Community server, use Discord’s onboarding questions to send people to the channels that match what they came for.
• Give newcomers something to do: an introductions thread, a weekly screenshot channel, a question of the day.
• Have a moderator or regular say hello to new people for the first few weeks. A human reply is the strongest retention tool you have.

Measure it. Once a week, check how many members who joined seven days ago have posted at least once. That share is your real growth number, and it is the one every source below should be judged on. The glossary entries on retention and churn explain the idea if you are new to it.

Where real Discord members come from

Your own audience comes first because it converts best. Put the invite where people already are: a pinned comment and video description, a stream panel, a button in your game’s main menu, a link in your website’s footer. Tell them what they get by joining, such as patch notes a day early, a place to find teammates, or a monthly build contest.

Partnerships work when the servers share an audience but do not compete for it, for example a speedrunning server and a server for the same game’s modding scene. A partner announcement in each server is fine. A deal where members are asked to join each other’s servers in return is the join-for-join scheme Discord names.

Events give people a reason to come on a specific day. A tournament, a Q&A with a developer, or a community build night brings people who want to take part, and those are the members who stay.

Server Discovery requirements

Server Discovery lets people find public servers by topic inside Discord. According to Discord’s help article on enabling it, a server must be a Community server, have at least 1,000 members, be at least 8 weeks old, and meet Discord’s activity and safety requirements. Discord checks activity on an ongoing basis, so a server padded with silent accounts does not help you here either.

That makes Discovery a reward for growth you already have, not a way to start. Treat 1,000 real, active members as the milestone that opens it, and use the other sources until then.

Track every source with its own invite link

Create a separate invite link for each place you promote: one for your YouTube channel, one for each listing site, one for each partner. Discord shows how many times each invite was used under Server Settings, Invites. On your website, you can also tag the page that holds the invite with UTM parameters to see which campaign sent the visit.

Can you pay to promote a Discord server?

You can pay for advertising that shows your server to people who choose whether to join. You cannot pay people, directly or through a reward, to join it. That rule also covers rewarded tasks on offerwalls and task sites: a task that says “join this server, screenshot the member list, earn points” is a join induced with a reward, which is what Discord’s policy forbids.

Sharklio’s campaign rules say that tasks must not break the terms of the platform they send users to, and every campaign is checked by our team before it runs. A task campaign that pays users for joining a Discord server breaks Discord’s rules, so it is rejected at review. Our guide to why campaigns get rejected covers this and the other common reasons.

What a pay-per-result campaign can do for a community is send people to something you own and let the server follow naturally. A game studio can pay per install that reaches a first level and put the Discord invite in the game menu. A creator can pay for credited visits to a website that has the invite among other links. The rule that keeps this clean is that no reward ever depends on joining. Incentivized traffic explained shows how to design a task around a result you would pay for even if the user never came back.

Five mistakes that stall a growing server

1. Promoting before onboarding works, so every new source seems to fail.
2. Judging sources by joins instead of members who post in their first week.
3. Accepting a partner deal that is really join-for-join.
4. Running a bot that auto-posts to look busy. The Guidelines ban self-bots, and members notice.
5. Buying a “starter pack” of members. Beyond the rules, fake accounts make the server look dead to every real person who arrives.

Once the server is growing, How to monetize a Discord server covers the models Discord allows. If you also run a Telegram channel, How to get Telegram channel subscribers applies the same method under Telegram’s rules.

Frequently asked questions