A lot of people wonder why Midjourney uses Discord instead of a webapp or mobile app.
The design decision came about by accident:
The Midjourney team is remote, and during development they used Discord to debug the system internally.
The remote team found out that a Midjourney bot let them collaborate more effectively. They could send prompts to the bot and all see the results together.
After testing the bot on Discord with a group of users, they realized that it was a hit.
People loved the communal discovery and anticipation of seeing their images emerge and being shown to other people in the group.
The MJ team decided to go all in on Discord and build the Midjourney experience though a bot.
David Holz doesn't think of Midjourney as a chatbot. Rather, he sees it as a vehicle to get you to where you want to be (hence the name Midjourney). And he believes the social aspect to be a critical part of the Midjourney experience.
Criticism
Midjourney is the fastest growing Discord server of all time. Today it has over 10 million users and is still growing.
Users have increasingly complained that the Midjourney server is slow and it is impossible to keep track of your generations, when they got lost in the sea of other peoples' generations.
Users have much better experiences inviting the bot to their own servers.
Will Midjourney release a Web App / Mobile App?
It already has!
The Web App alpha is released and is available to anyone in the 10k club (the private channel in the Midjourney server for anybody with over 10k Midjourney generations). To check how many generations you have, type the command /info to the Midjourney bot.