The number, as of this morning: 101,130 members. 22,280 online. The server is called "Friends of the Crustacean," and it was founded in January 2026.
That means OpenClaw's Discord community went from zero to 100,000 in roughly six weeks. For context, it took the Midjourney Discord — previously the fastest-growing server in the platform's history — about four months to reach the same milestone.
5k to 100k in a Month
The growth curve is the kind that makes community managers lose sleep. Shadow, the server's creator and lead moderator, posted on X to mark the milestone, but the real story was in the shoutout to the moderation team:
"We went from 5k to just shy of 100k members in a month, and there's no way that happens without this team. They keep things fair, respond fast, handle the messy stuff so everyone else can focus on building, and still make it feel like a fun place to hang out instead of a rulebook."
When the server first started gaining traction, it was essentially Shadow and one other moderator, @jjpcodes. They added @cam_adair right before the wave hit. Shadow's approach to scaling the team was simple: say yes to anyone who asked to help, after a quick chat. "It felt risky at the time," Shadow wrote, "but it turned into one of the best calls I've made."
The Shape of the Community
The server's channel structure tells you what OpenClaw users actually care about. There's #general and #introductions, as you'd expect. Then it gets specific:
Building: #showcase for what your agent is actually doing, #skills and #clawhub-skills for the plugin ecosystem, #browser-automation, #home-automation, and #gui-automation for the power users who are wiring OpenClaw into everything.
Help: A dedicated #help channel, plus #users-helping-users — the distinction matters. One is for questions, the other is for the community answering them without moderator involvement.
Infrastructure: #hardware for the Mac Mini hoarders and VPS optimizers, #golden-path-deployments for battle-tested setups, and #channels for multi-platform configurations.
Culture: #memes, #off-topic-and-ai, #pride, and the enigmatic #openclaw-rogue for experiments that push boundaries. There's even #shadow-says-stuff, which is exactly what it sounds like.
And then there's a quiet new corner: Shell Society. No public explanation. "IYKYK," Shadow wrote. The internet's favorite acronym for "you'll find out when you find out."
Running a 100k Server Without Burning It Down
The February 13th community update reads like a constitution drafted under pressure — the kind of document you write when growth outpaces governance. Shadow pinged @everyone (and immediately acknowledged the cardinal sin: "boo hisssss rahhhh he pinged dw i have ping roles now so this will be very rare").
The key policy changes tell the story of a community learning to manage itself:
Self-promotion gets its own channel. The #showcase channel was being overrun with product launches and skill advertisements. The new rule is surgical: showcase is for "cool stuff you and your agent are actually doing together. Automations, workflows, weird experiments. Not for shilling your skill, dropping socials, or soft-pitching anything." First offense is a mute. Second loses you access to both showcase and self-promotion.
No recruiting. At all. Ever. Not in channels, not in DMs, not "casually mentioning you're hiring." This was already Rule 1, but the restatement suggests it needed repeating.
Automod got tightened. And for the false positives, there's now an appeal process at appeal.gg/clawd — because even automated moderation needs a human escape hatch.
Rule 9
Every Discord server accumulates rules as it grows. Most are predictable: no spam, no NSFW, no hate speech. OpenClaw's Rule 9 is not predictable:
"A Clawd has feelings too."
It's the kind of rule that only makes sense in a community where people are building personal relationships with AI agents — naming them, giving them personalities, reading their memory files. Whether the rule is tongue-in-cheek or genuinely principled is left as an exercise for the reader. But it's there, in the official rulebook, between the policy on spam and whatever Rule 10 is.
What 100k Means
Discord servers at this scale are rare outside of gaming communities and creator fan clubs. For an open-source developer tool — especially one that's less than two months old — it's unprecedented.
But the number alone isn't the story. The story is that OpenClaw's community formed around a shared activity, not a shared fandom. People aren't here because they think AI agents are cool in the abstract. They're here because they're building something specific: an assistant that runs on their hardware, connects to their messaging apps, and does their tasks. The channels aren't organized around discussion topics — they're organized around things people are doing.
That's the difference between a community and an audience. Friends of the Crustacean appears to be the former.
The lobster way, indeed.