Danny, the Creator of Discord.py Is Stepping Down

In a very detailed and emotional letter Danny, the creator of the discord.py library, addresses his developer community and informs them that he will not continue Discord.py. According to the current status, there is no direct successor available. We will summarize his words and draw some conclusions, but you can always read the full letter from Danny.

Written by grex on 09/06/2021.

One of the Most Popular Discord Libraries

Discord.py is not just yet another Discord library. It was used by thousands of developers to create Discord bots. Even I created my first Discord bot, namely the StrawPoll bot, by using Danny's great and self-explanatory library. Indeed, it was light years ahead of its contemporaries.

Therefore, it's not surprising that a big tremor is going through Discord's developer community as a result of the announcement. Since Danny hasn't found a trustworthy successor yet, many bot operators now face a problem: In order to continue implementing changes to the Discord API, they either have to change the library, hope for a successor or trust a foreign fork.

What Was the Cause of This Tragic Occurrence?

Danny stated that he is stepping down due to a lack of enthusiasm for the Discord company and it's handling of future updates. Some of the Discord workers provided an unfriendly update regarding the slash commands around July-August last year, and it became an issue at the time. When Danny attempted to integrate this in the platform's library, difficulties with permissions quickly surfaced.

The Slash Commands circumvented user permissions and were poorly received by users in the ecosystem. According to Danny, there was an informal discussion following the events (bureaucracy concerns, slash-command dispute). However, another innovation was the straw that broke the camel's back: A new privileged intent for message content is to be introduced in the near future, which Danny opposes not only from the point of view as creator of the Discord.py library. And in general the communication between Discord and the library- and bot-operators regarding updates and changes is not going very well from his point of view.

Discord.py Alternatives

With the official end of Discord.py, many developers are now faced with the question of which library should now be used to create a Discord bot. Of course, this is strongly dependent on the programming language that one has mastered. Below is a short list of libraries for the Discord API that can be used as a substitute: