I was laying in bed on the morning of the 23rd of march 2019, thinking of Discord, and I came to the understanding that these long, randomised invite links that are generated make it really difficult to share your server with others who may wish to join. I have no idea how anyone can remember a random string of 6 to 8 characters featuring uppercase and lowercase letters, as well as numbers to boot!
I thought back to a time not so long ago online, where people would use the service TinyURL to generate their own links to share sites easily with others, and thought that a concept similar to that would be great for Discord, with the emphasis on “the shorter the link, the better”.
I set about to searching for top level domains made up of only two letters, much similar to the one this site is using at the moment. I stumbled across the .im TLD, which is respresentative of The Isle of Man, and thought “Hey, Discord is an Instant messenger of sorts, that could work great!”. I stumbled in my mind for a short while thinking of what short acronym to use for the site, even though I had an inkling in my head of what it should be.
It was then I comitted, this would be it, this would be what would become one of the best services anyone could provide to a Discord user. This would be…
Dus.im – The Discord URL Shortener
I was ecstatic to have had this idea. I checked around other people’s custom link makers and similar services of the sort. They were all long, Fake-Discord-like URLs, and required many steps to operate. I decided that Dus.im links need not be handled through the use of an always present bot on your server, which was most often the case with these sites, but rather a simple .htaccess redirect.
It took a few days to code the site and get everything working nicely. It was a good time. Once done, I announced it by printing adverts and spreading them around. I filmed a short advert too! Here it is!
The immediate reception from friends was really nice, and although it is not as big as some of the more popular offerings about the place today, I still think that this website is THE BEST CUSTOM DISCORD URL PROVIDER!
Oh, and if you use Discord and want your own link, find me on Discord by going to https://Dus.im/discord
Cool Huh!?