When Discord’s biggest music bots started shutting down one after the other in 2021 over copyright pressure, the obvious move for most servers was to find a hosted replacement. We took the opposite path and built our own: parrot, a small, fast, host-it-yourself Discord music bot designed to do one thing well - play audio from anywhere yt-dlp can reach, with as little ceremony as possible.

Written in Rust on top of Serenity and Songbird, parrot is built around the idea that a self-hosted bot should be a single binary with a .env file, not a service. A single docker run and you have a working bot. The codebase is small enough that new contributors can find their way around quickly, which is part of why it has kept growing.

It has been a long-running collaboration with @aquelemiguel and @joao-conde, focused on keeping the surface area small while staying responsive to the kinds of edge cases real Discord servers run into - flaky network conditions, large queues, abusive inputs. Source on GitHub.