Admin

Importing from Discord

The biggest switching cost for moving a community off Discord is starting from zero — no channels, no roles, no history. The owner-only Import tool (Instance Settings → Import, added in v0.3.0) removes that: point it at an existing Discord server and it recreates the structure here.

Run this once, early. It's a first-time-setup tool, not a sync — re-running it against a server that already has content will create duplicate channels, roles, and emoji, not merge into what's there. Do it before real Outpost-native content accumulates.

Setting up the Discord side

Create a Discord bot application at discord.com/developers/applications and copy its bot token.
Invite the bot to the Discord server you're migrating from, granting it View Channels and Read Message History.
If you're importing message history, also enable the Message Content Intent under the bot's settings — without it, Discord won't hand over message text at all.

This uses a real Discord bot application with your own bot token and the official Discord API, rate-limit handling included — not a self-bot/user-token scraper, which is the actual pattern that risks a Discord ToS violation.

What gets imported

Channels — text and voice. Discord categories don't have an Outpost equivalent, so a category gets flattened into the channel name (a Gaming category with a game-chat channel becomes gaming-game-chat).
Roles — name, color, and position, plus a best-effort mapping from Discord's ~40-flag permission bitfield down to Outpost's 7 permissions. Review the Roles tab after import; this mapping is coarse by design, not 1:1.
Custom emoji — re-hosted on your own instance, usable immediately as :name:.
Message history — off by default (it can take a while on a large server, and is rate-limited by Discord's own API). Each original Discord author is represented by their own webhook identity, named and avatar'd after them — not a real account, and not one shared "Discord Import" identity.

What doesn't

Members. No API can silently add someone to an Outpost instance — people still join via invite individually, same as any other new member.
Mentions, threads, pins, and reactions from the original Discord messages. A <@id> mention renders as literal text (the target has no Outpost account to link to).
Only the first attachment on a message — Outpost's message model has one attachment slot, not a list.

Your bot token is used only in memory for the duration of the import job — it's never written to the database or logged.