Raided twice.
Built three times.

The polished version of this story is: I founded a 300+ member Discord community for tech enthusiasts. The real version is messier, more honest, and far more interesting.

COVID hit during what was supposed to be a normal school year. Offline socialising stopped. I moved online like everyone else — and I wanted to build something I could call my own. I started a Discord server with a group of school friends. We had scheduled calls every day and played online games together. Slowly they invited their friends, who invited theirs. Every new join felt significant. We reached 40 members — strangers I didn't personally know. Trusting them was hard at first.

I started partnering with other servers — cross-posting join links as mutual advertising. I ran events around Dank Memer, a Discord bot with its own economy and community. The server exploded. At peak: 1,100 members. Then the first raid hit. We lost 900 people in a single day. Every channel destroyed. Every role wiped.

I didn't quit. I rebuilt it. Took it back up to 950. We were approaching 1,000 when the second raid came — worse than the first. Again: everything gone. I rebuilt it a third time. But this time I asked myself an honest question: what am I actually building this for? I had been building a community for the sake of having built something. I didn't have a real reason for it to exist.

That question became the pivot. I changed the server's identity entirely — from a gaming hub to a genuine community for tech enthusiasts like me. A place to talk about hardware, software, and everything in between, among people who actually cared. I called it Hardware Decoded.

hardwaredecoded.com — the website

As the server grew, I noticed a problem: important conversations were getting buried in chat history. A discussion about overclocking that took three hours to work through — gone within a day. A beginner asking for help with their first build — lost under new messages before anyone could respond. The Discord was alive but not durable.

So I built hardwaredecoded.com — a companion website designed to preserve the conversations worth keeping. It serves as a knowledge base, a resource hub, and a structured home for the information that kept disappearing in the fast-moving chat. Articles, guides, hardware reviews, and community-contributed content — all searchable, all permanent.

The website has had 700+ active users in the past 3 months — people who found it through search or through the Discord, and who come back because it actually answers their questions. It's not a marketing page for the server. It's a standalone resource that makes the path to becoming a tech enthusiast genuinely easier.