Discord vs Lanyard

Discord's REST and Gateway APIs let bots and apps manage servers, channels, messages, and slash commands, authenticated with a bot token for server-side integrations or OAuth2 for user-facing flows like account linking. Rate limits are enforced per route and per bucket, and most guild-management scopes only work once the bot has been added to a server with matching OAuth2 permission scopes.

Lanyard exposes a Discord user's live presence — online status, current activities (games, Spotify listening data), and any custom key-value data set via their Discord bio — over a free public REST endpoint or a subscribable WebSocket feed, with no authentication required. The catch is that both the requester and the target user must share a Discord server with Lanyard's bot, since Discord's gateway only surfaces presence data for mutual-guild members.