The & is an indicator to most shells to run this command in “the background”. Try and run ( sleep 10; echo hi ) & - you’ll see you get your shell prompt back, where you can run more commands, but 10 second later you’ll see that ‘hi’ come through. ‘blocking’ is the default behavior, if you don’t add the & you’re still going get the hi in ten seconds, but you don’t get a prompt because your shell’s execution is blocked until your command is done.

The doc here is indicating that you havea choice between autostart_blocking.sh and autostart.sh, the latter of which would be run with a &. They could have expressed this better.

As for why your script didn’t work, I’d try executing it in a terminal to see what error message comes up.

it’s awful and I hate it. I generally prefer not to have a shared identity across communities, and there’s no way to create a usable discord identity without a phone number.