When the coronavirus pandamic first struck Austria in 2020, I used to spend a lot of time with my friends on Discord. During that period, there was a huge hype about Discord bots, particularly those capable of joining voice channels and playing music. Quickly, people noticed that you could monetize bots by offering "premium" features that users would have to pay for. As a result, many music bots began limiting playtime, streaming platform support and track skipping - basically anything that made users reach for their credit cards.
Motivated by this, I decided to develop my own music bot called Britta, which offered the same functions as the big players, but completely free and for everyone.
What started out as a good solution to a personal problem my friends and I had, soon attracted greater interest from users all over the world.
I made Britta available to the general public by adding the bot to top.gg, a large Discord bot list. The following months my bot was added to hundreds of Discord guilds and used by thousands of users. Britta was even declared a verified bot by Discord and received a little checkmark badge. Simultaneously, the GitHub repository gained a significant amount of stars.
Things drastically changed when YouTube disallowed Discord bots to stream songs from their platform. There was no other option but to take the bot offline in September 2021.
Finally, I would like to thank everyone who was involved in this great project. Special shout out to Jyotirmoy Bandyopadhayaya also known as Bravo68Web who helped me develop Britta's Spotify integration. Even though Britta is no longer active and parts of the code are probably long deprecated, I hope that the code will at least be an inspiration for other developers.
Britta's first version was a simple single instance vanilla Node.js application. Basically, it was all about parsing user messages (=raw text) properly, interpret a user's commands and subsequently perform certain actions:
After about half a year of development I migrated Britta to TypeScript.