Yes-- a classmate uses it. They do @everyone announces in their server every day, and while you can mute actual notifications, it still adds one to your badge count. My attention is too valuable-- that would get me to cancel my subscription.
I've operated on the assumption that MidJourney is deliberately knee-capping their growth by making it only work on Discord to ensure they don't grow faster than they can add hardware.
I could be entirely wrong, though. Maybe the person making that decision is just an idiot.
I have an IRC bot that has triggers for DALL-E, GPT3, and ChatGPT. I really want to make one for MidJourney, and I would happily pay MJ for the privilege. But I can't. Not without breaking some rules.
Even if you turn all permissions on for your bot including the ability to use slash commands it won't be able to send commands to the Discord mid journey bot. (And there is no publicly exposed API)
The only way to do it right now would be to create a separate dedicated discord account linked to midjourney, and then have your bot control that user account and that's a good way not only to get your MJ access revoked but also to have your discord account banned.
As far as kneecaping their growth, they have one of the largest discord channels in history and they frequently run up against compute limits, so if this was one of their ostensible goals they failed at it pretty spectacularly.
They have a <10 person team IIRC, using Discord as an interface saves a TON of money/effort/maintenance/risk, etc, as best as I understand, and lets them focus on the technical product. Remember, Discord is giving them free content legal protection by proxy, even if that's not necessarily the original intended effect I think. There's a lot to gain by riding alongside Discord as a primary interface vehicle, I personally believe.
They're good enough technically at what they do that their audience is okay with the interface that they have to use, I'd reckon (I've heard similar beefs about the UI stuff though, so it sorta makes sense).
