Discord will soon let anyone find public server messages through Google
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Then we went to separate game specific voice chat platforms which were inconsistent, but meant you struggled to find a way to chat with mates outside of something like Skype at the time.
Discord was one of the first platforms that was firstly free and allowed you one place to chat with friends and communities about games AND had very good quality audio.
People use it for all sorts of things, however I use it fairly minimally and only to be able to voice chat with friends either when gaming together or playing separate games. I don't get understand some peoples problems with it, it works better than anything else out there for what I use it for.
it's a super low-friction text, voice & screenshare program with support for your whole WoW guild (or whatever communities) and you have "genuinely zero idea" why people use it?
I think there is a whole generation of people that have very fond memories of discord and everyone outside that window does not have that connection at all.
An addendum to that might be that other people have used other services before discord even existed that had better (?) feature sets but didn't win out and that can create confusion because neither group of people understands what the other group is talking about because there is no shared experience.
The fact that it also scales up to handle hundreds or thousands of concurrent users made it work for pretty much everyone. Suddenly you had one place you could go where there were thousands of other people all interested in the same thing you were interested in, and could meet new people or new friend groups over that said shared interest.
It also absolutely needed:
- persistent, non-disappearing text chats that last forever*
- Free image uploads (and thus meme sharing)
- voice chat & screen sharing, proxied (so no DDOS attacks after a malicious person grabs your IP in a public voice chat)
- role-based access control, so you could have an announcements chat for your server where only admins can say things, you can appoint certain people as moderators, etc
- a mobile app with push notifications (to mimic the text message paradigm of being always available to chat with your friends)
- Discord building out the ability to connect custom bots so early
*: No word yet on if they'll ever start cleaning up old messages and attachments. There must be hundreds of petabytes of attachments stored in multi-AZ google cloud buckets that will never be accessed ever again.
Most are software related, or why not genealogy or mesh networking?
I never started using discord for gaming, I just find its everywhere.
But half the good is that they are not some wide-open, forever-indexed forum like reddit.
Yes. The UI is so bad I wouldn't call it "zero friction". But it's just my opinion.
- Remember to gift Nitro to your friends!
- Have you played any Quests to get any Orbs?
- Did you know about Discord Nitro?
- Did you know there are server tags now?
- Did you know this server has a server tag?
- Did you know this server has a server tag?
- Did you know this server has a server tag?
- Did you know this server has a server tag?
- Did you know this server has a server tag?
- Subscribe to Nitro to use these emojis! (Every time you open the emoji picker)
- Did you know there are username styles now?
- Subscribe to Nitro to use animated avatars!
- Did you know there are per-server profiles now? (If you subscribe to Nitro!)
- Boost this server! (With Nitro)
- Here's a GIFs button that is forever part of the textbox buttons.
- Here's a Stickers button that is forever part of the textbox buttons.
- Here's an Apps button that is forever part of the textbox buttons. Just kidding, now it forever sits next to the textbox!
(A third of your horizontal screen estate is now textbox buttons)
- Here's a dedicated Gift button so you can buy Nitro for your friends too! In the textbox buttons.
- We have polls! Not in the textbox buttons though. It's in the same submenu as opening the file picker! Oh, did we mention you need an extra click to open the file picker now? (Why would we put it in the textbox buttons when we only put things there that upsell Nitro?)
- Did you know our new noise suppression is sponsored by Krisp? (Plasters Krisp logo everywhere)
- Have you played this game in Roblox yet?
- Verify your phone number to keep using Discord.
- Verify your ID to keep using Discord.
- Did you know which of your friends are playing games right now? (You can't turn this off)
- Earn Orbs by joining your friend in this sponsored game!
- Subscribe to Nitro for increased stream resolution!
- Did you know Nitro subscribers get 3 months of Xbox Game Pass free?
- Did you know Nitro subscribers get 1 month of Xbox Game Pass free?
- Did you know Xbox Game Pass subscribers get 3 months of Discord Nitro free??
- Did you know you can get a longer message length limit with Nitro?
I say this as someone who's used Discord basically daily since 2016. They are so much more bloated than they were, it's insane. And a lot of these are things nobody wants, not just stuff I personally didn't ask for.
Fuck the Halloween sound pack. I didn’t want it.
Bonus points that Discord intentionally knows they abuse and gaslight users with the popups and notifications; one point they hovered a “DIDNT ASK” over the X button to dismiss some of their stunts.
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040843952-K...
Most of the forums I can read when not signed in, with Discord I need to:
1) sign in to Discord
2) join to specific server
3) read and accepts all its rules, tems and conditions
4) optionally leave the server after I got all the information
i did not claim it is "lower friction for text-only searches than forums" or anything of that sort.
how could anyone possible enjoy x mainstream thing, i only use y hyper niche thing that signals my status to tech nerds.
queue the guy talking about the most obscure linux distro you can possibly imagine.
But people use it to store all information about some games - effectively replacing a wiki. And it is AWFUL for that. Everything about Discord makes it bad for that
- Can't be found in search engines
- Abysmal search functionality
- Abysmal discoverability
Can't search for or with symbols. Lots of search engines have this issue. Just ignores them. Want to search for instances of ":3"? You're actually searching for instances of "3". Not much else to say on this other than it's annoying.
Why would they have left their userbase in the same lackluster search situation for so many years… maybe genuinely massive backlog and improved search won’t improve their numbers like $otherPriority?
And weirdly, I then understood that there's no real global platform for a quick chat that everyone knows and CAN actively use. In universities we use Teams, but beyond that people are never active there...
But I also don't understand Twitter or Mastodon. It feels like there's so much better ways to both post stuff and reach people.
Really though, I do think people often equate popularity with being a healthy default solution for society.
A lot of people enjoy mcdonalds, and hell even I cave and buy it once in a while, but popular does not mean it is a healthy default for society.
The corpos are incentivized to addict you and trap you. Not to give you the best solution.
If one actually does research beyond "but all my friends use it" they would see Discord is objectively one of the worst things to happen to sovereign and privacy preserving communication on the internet in a long time. Tech communities using it should know better.
Whenever I see an open source project that says "Join my Discord" without any alternatives, I close the tab. If a technical project cannot find an hour to figure out how to setup a chat with their community without mandating use of a surveillance capitalism product, our goals are already too far apart.
Sooooooo what is your solution?
You just described every single, non-E2E communication product, because they are all indexed and used by surveillance capitalism, including governments and corporations.
Your problem isn't the tools, it's the internet.
OTR supports IRC, but in practice either solution beats the privacy of Discord, which requires all traffic to be sent in plain text to their corporate owned databases.
The functionality that should matter to free software projects is... freedom. I can forgive laypeople for not knowing any better, but it is pretty hard to overlook FOSS devs that should know better that -still- endorse Discord for FOSS development.
They want a service, not software.
If you'd like to build a clone or even a better version? I'd love to see it! I might use it!
As someone who was an irc operator, I can assure you, everything from IRC was funneled into ever place it was ordered to be...
That is the beauty of open systems. One can choose an operator that reflects their values.
Is a piece of shit with awful UX.
You do realize there are like a dozen clients for Matrix right? You can literally have any UX you want or even ask your favorite LLM to make a Discord UX clone that uses matrix protocol under the hood. That is how open networks work.
The design sucks. The clients suck.
I'm sure a lot of very well meaning people worked very hard at it! But from an end user and server operator POV, it's ass.
is the key here
the same reason WhatsApp and Telegram won on their markets
Also is slack free? I remember some debacle about their free tier being pretty poor.
What I don't like is the way they used to sell Nitro before they came up with the flashy cosmetics, restricting features that used to be free. And how they used a third party service for UK age verification that ended up hacked. And their security record in general. And being closed source with no official export tools.
I guess its all subjective.
There actually is technically an official method to request a copy of your own data (think Google Takeout): https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004027692-R...
I've used it once. It worked to recover some messages from DMs that were far enough down in my history they were no longer shown in the web/desktop UI. However, it only included my own messages in each DM/channel, without the context of whoever I was talking to.
Chat room is fine though.
For me, it also helps that all of my favorite communities are on it.
but still probably the best signal/noise community experience out there. and great customizations.
better than slack, or any competitors.
and if you say IRC i quit.
Why? Its primary use for me is having small, private communities of people who aren't entirely anonymous to eachother and isn't scraped (too much), commodified and filtered through an algorithm like most of the open internet. I would hate it if suddenly it became like reddit or facebook.
The open web really went down a bad path well over a decade ago and I think its time to hard-turn away from it until things get better. The benefits of everyone abandoning the open web are considerable.
Some people are annoyed because discord doesn't have the archival capacity of an old fasioned message board, and if that's your problem with it you're right, but I think the benefits of fluid accessibility and relative privacy outweigh the problems at the moment.
Reddit outside of some niche subs still largely deals with global thought policing.
The most popular servers are for AI companies, and video games.
Which is not too surprising for a platform heavily designed around supporting video gaming.
The themes are pretty clear, and having a political discussion does not appear prominent.
in any case, i dont think the "hunter biden laptop" discord group is opting into this feature.
But I do see, generally young, people join niche discords that don't necessarily see 24/7 activity say something like "Hey anyone here?" then a few minutes later "lol dead server". I think it's because for a lot of younger people they mostly want the socialization aspect over just a place to share about a hobby. They go on discord when they want to talk to people.
https://lemmy.world
You also can't call anyone or anything fascist, or say anything that an LLM can twist into being a call for violence. For a while they were banning anyone who said the word "Luigi".
are you going to claim censorship or thought-policing if it's pointed out to you that personal insults are not cool here?
what are you on about, man?
you can get worked up all you want, i'm just reminding you of the guidelines you agreed to when you created your account here.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhjSYYRGNprYzOArDU9B5...
Here's a nice youtube playlist from Dr. Wilson on why discussing Covid conspiracies is basically a right wing talking point and lie. A damnable lie even.
If you want to "discuss Covid" go right ahead, but repeating misinformation that effectively led to the death of millions of people should leave you ashamed, as you are either a tool of evil or despicable yourself.
Enjoy the open discussion!
The popular predecessor to Discord was TeamSpeak. It ran on your own servers and that made it hard to set one up. That's why Discord groups are called "servers", they were hijacking established teamspeak terminology their audience would be familiar with.
And reddit died around the same time by extreme over-moderation.
dont forget about vent and mumble!
mumble, admittedly, not so much.
No one said discord wasn't popular. It's substantially popular with gaming communities. It's also very popular with non gaming communities, many of which found it an an alternative to Reddit and others.
"This is such a wrong thing to say that I'm surprised you haven't received reprisal for it"
Proving his point in real time
It's like you custom designed your post to make his exact point.
It means I can put half-finished story summaries there, without spoilering or alerting potential future readers to the plot ideas, that sort of thing.
A hierarchy of privacy levels is necessary in order for people to speak as they like.
This was a feature.
This was desired.
This was welcomed by all actors involved.
(You're not an actor but a spectator, unless you own a Discord server)
Nobody owns Discord servers except Discord's server admins. I don't mean the glorified mods of glorified channel groups, I mean the real admins of the real servers!
These are just network effects.
Furthermore, what if someone wants to opt-out of their messages being indexed in some Discord servers but not others? I don't see that option being available right now.
"Messages from before mid-December 2026 aren’t included, regardless of your setting." Seems like they thought of this, at least.
I feel like it should be opt in/out regardless of the size of the server and amount of activity it has.
There will always be new questions, one that even AI cannot figure out alone. Things that require other environments or polled feedback. Making these channels indexable on the internet is critical to the progress of information.
However, the server administrator enables the "discoverability" feature for everyone. So the entire history of members who never chose this option suddenly becomes discoverable and linked to their accounts. Use the same nickname on GitHub or X - and in a matter of seconds, it will point to the same person.
And this feature does not affect old messages - only ones after December 2026.
As for turning a public server private or vice versa, that’s a very noticeable and impactful decision in lots of ways already.
that being said, my internet history from when i was 13 is on some discord servers at risk of going public. ive been letting that stuff remain up for sentimentality reasons, but it seems i will need to do a wipe of some old servers i have been on just in case. been meaning to do this for years, but this is whats making me finally feel the need to do it. (i got lucky and the forums where the rest of my teenage internet activity was have all been wiped for years.)
With this announcement, I'm actually interested in studying the discord and participating in discord servers now! I'd much rather participate in an open garden than a closed garden.
(That said, I think the fear is a little overblown and borne out of a general distrust of the direction discord is going.)
Back in the old days (tm) you would post (maybe under a pseudonym) in the internet and dont care that much. Someone could theoretically stalk you through all the sites with moderate effort and depending on how far back we are on the timeline, but still, the Internet felt somewhat private (an illusion) sure, but for a vast amount of people, your post on furry-forum-24 was probably never seeing the light of day outside of that specific space and then it got shuttered 2007. LLMs make that so easy, filing everything away, the web is already thousand times crawled over, but now there are handy tools to search it more easily, with vague concepts, see patterns with a way much bigger working brain so to speak. I myself are quite reluncatant to write anything on the internet these days that is to personal, which is a censorship in itself. I am not sure how it is in actual oppressive censorship states like china or the usa (if you got a left-ish opinion) but the will to not write anything personal is a loss of connection to strangers that was definetly there before. Usually in tiny tidbits that were harmless in itself. But now one can trivially gather all those tiny specs of data so easy..makes it hard to say anything anymore. Same if you are averse of helping the slop machine of getting more art, texts or thoughts.
Especially for communities that have valuable discussions and support going on in Discord, Obsidian or Astro come to my mind, this is super helpful.
I do wonder about their motivations behind this, making the web a more open and user friendly place is obviously good for the users, how does Discord profit from this? Forcing users into creating an account to view valuable information seemed like a profitable thing for Discord.
Try new Y thing! it doesn't do annoying Z thing!
Oh no, Y added annoying Z thing! how come nobody saw this coming :(
Quick self-promo to my website: https://mirror.forum which can help people find some fluxer communities and also help migrate discord communities to fluxer. It also works for not just fluxer but also matrix and stoat as well.
I have submitted Fluxer 2 times on Hackernews if not more, I really really strongly believe that people of HN should look into it more & (maybe my website as well :D)
Yes! Feedback is great and means a lot to me. I never thought about that. I do wonder though how do I exactly fix that as monospace is rather the core identity of my website. I might have to re-think the whole website but I will try to provide the ability for your own fonts. I would sincerely love some great feedback here as well because I had built it extremely with monospace in mind because I thought that it would look good. But perhaps it looks good but monospace is not practical here as you suggest. I can be wrong, I usually am and it was just me wishing to play with monospace fonts.
> says “terminal-grade communities” (whatever that means),
It just sort of reflected the style of it being terminal or (retro?) but if I have to answer what that means: It probably means nothing relevant, as such, I will remove it.
(Full story for those curious)
It was an experiment: I just had bought a domain out of an mirror: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47330475 (TLDR: someone on HN wanted to show someone else mirror so they showed mirror.org and It led to a very high price so I wondered what the cheapest mirror.<tld> which I like could be), mirror.online was available for 1st year for 1$ at Namecheap (I use tld-list.com to find cheap domain tlds)
(extreme side note I also have a custom tampermonkey script to sometimes find the cheapest one ie. completely available not premium domains but yeah I need to make the script slightly better)
[I built the project because the domain was idling and I wanted to experiment with the architecture of a pure golang binary with modernc sqlite and a 7$/yr VPS and https://owickstrom.github.io/the-monospace-web/ and I wanted a real project for that so I thought of it after discovering fluxer]
It is sadly vibe-coded. Thus the terminal-graded community comment. I am sorry if I didn't disclose it. I tried to show it to people and didn't get much response and so in the end, I was still happy with the experiment because I just wanted to tinker around but after its completion I was satisfied thus I didn't tinker more with it other than running it and showing it to my friends sometimes.
But knowing that a person cares about it to give me feedback enough makes me warrant to fix the changes that you've mentioned. I will try to fix them.
I will try to add an about-me page and make it better.
Though that being said, I think that the domain renewal is coming soon and I might sell the domain as renewal of 20$ is still slightly expensive for me for experiments (college student budget here!). If I do that, I will hopefully try to create a last archive.org pointing to a new subdomain of a more long lasting domain that I will try to have.
Have a nice day :-D
AFAIK, Zulip doesn't have any sort of built in calling, streaming, etc. right? Fluxer has that I'm addition to the Discord style chat features.
It's on Poob. Poob has it for you.
So I googled it. And yes, we are, and that's the entire joke of Poob.
tbh, I kinda wanna make a Poob website now. The front page describes itself as the ultimate social media site where you can do anything, taking major inspiration from the classic Zombocom. Yet, there won't be a Register or Login button anywhere. Just a static site.
All privacy is just extra layers from the public. They want to remove all those layers (which in this case is just the barrier to entry of writing API calls)
Why tho
Maybe it should be put in Forum Mode only or something. Because just finding random chats is likely not going to be helpful at all.
The servers I've joined typically have a lobby where you land right after joiming, and you need an admin to approve you before you get access to the actual channels
1) Bring people on Discord
2) put ads on Discord
3) Enshittify.
Or having all of the search/scrape data itself be part of the training process of Google/other's AI process?
A quick LLM search gives me the answer as a "maybe", but knowing the financial incentives at hand and why Discord might be opening up. I remain slightly skeptical as to why Discord wishes to open up to Google*
they aren't opening up to google specifically. any search engine will be able to index the content on the server web pages.
>but knowing the financial incentives at hand and why Discord might be opening up.
one of the biggest complaints about discord (other than all of the grooming and such) is that communities move to discord and then all of their (previously freely available) information is locked behind a login.
addressing a big complaint that many people have about your service is a good financial move.
Based on what I've read, there will be a short summary then you are given the login page. Not unlike a paywalled news website. Still an improvement, but it does not fully address this criticism.
My apologies. I didn't see that and skimmed through the web-page and I thought that it was a discord-google specific deal.
> one of the biggest complaints about discord (other than all of the grooming and such) is that communities move to discord and then all of their (previously freely available) information is locked behind a login.
> addressing a big complaint that many people have about your service is a good financial move.
True, that can very well be the case but my question of AI training still stands. Couldn't this make many discord texts/discussions part of AI training corpus and AI models as has been the case for many such situations.
I but am just slightly worried about all the AI training that can happen but other than that, its a good change!
Needless to say, none of this applies to your server with 15 people in it.