on Discord client modding:

This isn’t really about client mods, but a very quick post about the community and what its done for me in the past year and a half. A bit related, I guess.

I have been in the Discord client modding community for about a year and half.

I was in the Powercord server, and being part of the community there during lockdown was amazing and I met many people I stilll talk to now.

Then I was in the Vizality community for a while, before settling in with the Cumcord users (not many at the time!).

I write this now roughly a year after I began writing plugins - this had a HUGE impact on me:

it taught me JavaScript, which is huge
it taught me how to handle users of your software
it taught me how to adapt and work around very difficult problems
it was the first time I’d ever been sat in bed at midnight writing code
once I began contributing to the mod itself, it taught me how to work with a team and stay organised.

I now like to think I have a pretty damn good understanding of JS, a tool I use LOADS, but I would never have this without having encountered this community.

All this to say- the client modding community has been a massive net positive force on me over lockdown and has provided me an incredible opportunity to reach real users and write software that is actually used by people all around the world - and just as some random kid who, until a few weeks ago, hadn’t even started college yet.

Discord recently switched from Babel to SWC in its CI pipelines, which broke every desktop and web client mod.

Cumcord and its entire ecosystem, including my hundreds of hours work on plugins, are all deprecated and unmaintained, but this is a fresh start, and if I could time travel, I wouldn’t take back a single minute of those hours.

Plugins were becoming increasingly annoying to write and debug with every Discord update, and I was sick of it by this point - building is fun, fixing is not.

I can now work freely on my own projects, and work closely with the incredible people who made up the Cumcord team - most of whom are now members of the uwunet developer collective, so we can all work together.

I want to thank every single person I’ve interacted with in client modding, because both its existence and its death now has been hugely important for me, by giving me a community and then freeing it from its original centre.

The uwu team are now working on a new client mod, which will be lower maintainance and an entirely new innovation in the space. It should be low maintenance and allow us to work much more on our other projects while keeping all our creature comforts of a modded Discord client.

UPDATE, OVER A YEAR LATER, LOL: https://github.com/uwu/shelter.

I hope you all stick around to see what me and my friends work on in the future.

Thanks for all the fish, — Yellowsink.