The founder gave an interesting interview about this.

In short when they did user testing with a Web UI, people would write a basic prompt "dog", "cat" and then get stuck.

Discord makes it social by default, you can see what people are prompting and get inspiration.

I also found it a bit weird, but now that ive onboarded its great having a multi platform native experience (ie even chatgpt still has no mobile apps).

I don't know anyone who's used Midjourney more than a day and stuck around in one of the newbies channels; pretty much everyone slides into the bot's DMs.

The social angle is not what's fueling Midjourney's success. The quality of its output certainly is.

I dunno, even if it only matters for a couple of hours starting out, those hours might easily be critical. There are many technically strong products that fail because they didn't know how to get users to take those first timid steps.

Some friends invites the Midjourney bot into our own discord server. And sometimes we mess around with it. It's kinda fun this way.

I agree that the social learning component is very useful. Initially, I was taken aback that they force you to use discord but it is great for learning from others.

> It's an archivists nightmare.

My experience has been exactly the opposite.

I created my own Discord "server" (which is not truly a server per se; more like your server account [1]), and then installed MJ bot. This way I can keep all my creations in a single place, with the added benefit that I have my own channels for things like compilation of links, prompts database, separate channels for different types of creations, and so on.

I even invited a couple of family members to join my Discord server, so they can use MJ if they want, without having to share my Discord account (but of course it still counts towards my MJ credits).

All in all, I have been incredibly (and surprisingly) pleased with Discord experience.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDPY_bMPO0A

Wow! Thank you so much for sharing this, this is such a fantastic idea! It will be so much more convenient to use midjourney from now on!

I have done this too. How did you get the bot to use your MJ credits? I found that the bot still uses the credits of each person who invokes the command.

I'll take it back. I tested and you're right: it was using the caller's account, not the person who owns the server. So it doesn't share your MJ credits in any way.

There must be a way of creating a Discord bot wrapper which holds your credentials, but on a quick search I wasn't able to find anything.

What a big bummer. That would be the ideal environment.

Oh interesting, I assumed their usage was counting towards my credits, but I actually didn't check, so maybe I'm wrong. Will test and report back.

Discord is all kinds of nightmares. Every time I open it I have to close multiple popovers trying to sell me things, something about "Nitro", stuff about running my own Discord etc. Then there's the fact that there's red dots on channels that I've never been in and there's no way of working out why I have a red dot on there or viewing just my mentions. I hate it.

Discord is actually a really great experience for power users. I can generate new image sets as fast as I can type because MJ's Discord bot takes care of everything else for me.

Are there SD applications that have UX as good as that?

Running locally I can get SD’s webui to spit out images in about 6-10s on my hardware.

Ok, but I can queue up 5+ prompts in the same timeframe using MJ. Being able to concurrently test lots of prompts is really nice.

Yeah, I can also queue prompts and do things like X/Y plots and matrices. Also SD is free.

But I’m not saying one is better than the other, I think they each have pros/cons, just wanted to list numbers for the curious.

But then you have to scroll through the entire chat to find your images (unless there’s an east way to jump to your results without trawling through the whole thing).

You can also just look at your profile on the website and all your images will be there

There’s a tab for notifications/mentions that shows only your output.

I created a private server solely for the purpose of playing with MJ.

Super agree on the Discord point. Feels foreign to run an entire business model by relying on a third party chat service.

> It's an archivists nightmare.

I’m guessing you are referring to archive.org style public archiving.

But, I’ll mention anyway that for your own generations there is a web interface to search and bulk download your images. And, a web interface is in the works. You lose out on the social aspect of prompting with friends. But, gain some UX for working solo. Or, you can work solo in a DM convo with the bot.

Repo for my C# bot which you can use to download (and annotate) all your creations. https://github.com/ernop/social-ai/

> Especially when the only interface is via Discord!

I hate to be one of those guys who bandies the term "UX" around, but yeah, that's terrible UX.

I'm willing to put up with it for v5, though. My local install of SD just doesn't measure up, at least not at present.

Yeah Base SD is pretty bad. That said, the new Kandinsky 2.1 model is really good. Much better than any of the base SD models and is open source. Try that some time

Bing image creator is also really good and free with a hundred generations per day

So everyone but some archivists are using it? Hack the system my friend

Midjourney v5 is like magic though. Imo stable diffusion doesn’t even come close.

There's a lot of Stable Diffusion models though, I would say the opposite, it's hard to compete for Midjourney when you have 20 different competing fined-tuned Stable Diffusion models depending on what you want along with ControlNet, automatic1111 & comfyui.

I agree with the parent comment. The quality of output images from MJ v5 is vastly better than anything I’ve been able to get out of SD regardless of which tuning model I’ve tried. SD’s underlying model on top of which everything is built just isn’t that good.

very different initial approaches to training dataset curation, to SD's detriment.

Can you be more explicit about what you mean? Also, the biggest difference is probably just the fact that MJ is using a much larger model than SD.

Seem about the same if you know how to use them imho. I’ll say one thing Midjourney images are always way more “basic” in terms of aesthetic. Everything looks like the Artstation front page, which while very competent is tacky look.

You can join discord just to use Midjourney. It’s really mot that big of a deal.

Tried to sign up, but won't bother after they falsely claimed a "security issue with my browser" and then demanded a phone number on that basis.

I hate this hostile, intrusive UX pattern. I verified my email, I never use VPN, and my browser's ad blockers were disabled. Yet they claim "security issue". Discord can shove their dishonesty.

And yes I tried one of those free number websites but didn't work because millions of other people use those same numbers.

Every month or two, I have a need to login to Discord for something like MJ. Discord's whole login sequence is more painful than any other website ever created. It has multiple borderline-crazy CAPTCHA challenges and still makes you verify by email and/or phone. This is on the same browser and device I logged into a month or two ago.

I don't get anything like this from other services on the same device.