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Possible · 2 min · Oct 7, 2026
Discord turned a vendor shutdown into shared safety infrastructure
After Twitter shut down Smite, Discord rebuilt its safety rules engine and donated it to Roost. Other platforms improved and adopted it, so the same rug pull need not happen again.
Camille François is a founding president of ROOST and professor at Columbia University.
Reid Hoffman, Host · Co-founder, Manas AI
Co-founded LinkedIn; one of OpenAI's first investors; Greylock partner.
- AF
Aria Finger, Host
About this segment
After Twitter shut down Smite, Discord rebuilt its safety rules engine and donated it to Roost. Other platforms improved and adopted it, so the same rug pull need not happen again.
From “Building safety tools no one can take away with ROOST’s Camille François”, Oct 7, 2026. Watch the full episode
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
“We just got the rug pulled super, super brutally from under our feet.”
Takeaways
- Smite's shutdown left platforms without tools they relied on.
- Discord donated its rebuilt rules engine to Roost as Osprey.
- BlueSky and others helped improve the shared tool.
In this episode
Full episode17:02Discord turned a vendor shutdown into shared safety infrastructure2:22
- 24:58Safety teams need tools for investigation and review, not just detection3:25Up next
- 51:42A two-person app used open-source tools to report 19 cases2:59
- 5 more moments in the full episode
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 17:06
Like, how does the dynamic play out? That's part of, like, the specifics within a commercial environment. Okay. So let's talk specifics of it. Yeah. I love the story of Smyte. So Smyte was a little startup that provided safety technologies to a bunch of companies. One of them was Discord. And Smyte, which, in fact, is a rules engine, got bought by Twitter because Twitter was like, yeah, that's very helpful for what we do.
- 17:33
I get that. And then Twitter shut it down. And so a number of companies, including Discord, was like, oh, we can't protect our users and community. We just got the rug pulled super, super brutally from under our feet. And so they did what they had to do, which is they did the very boring work of rebuilding everything from scratch. What they have rebuilt from scratch, they have donated to ROOST. It is the foundation for one of our core software projects called Osprey.
- 18:01
Because Discord was like, nobody needs to go through that again. I am going to open source that rules engine. And the second they did that, right, we worked with their engineering team because actually it takes a minute to open source an internal system. BlueSky came in and said, oh, that's great. I want to use that. So they started using this. And as a result, they started improving this. And so Discord said, OK, well, we want to use the branch that everybody is improving.
- 18:26
We want to benefit from the collective innovation of everybody who uses Osprey. And so Osprey is this amazing story of like, this is what the industry learned from Smyte. And this is what Discord decided to donate. And now this project, Osprey, is actually used by many different platforms and organizations at scale to investigate fraud and scams and coordinated harassment. And it's great to see it take a life of its own.
- 18:56
Yeah, it's awesome. Yeah, it's also fun for Discord because, well, as I said, like they benefit from the collective innovation and then they were able to spot really good engineering talent too. And so it becomes fun because all that really good engineering safety work also becomes visible, right? So morale boosting for the people who work on this and then also it's helpful for careers. Yes, absolutely. I mean, every engineer wants to work on something that millions and millions of people are using.
- 19:19
That's the benefit of being able to be part of that community.