I'm tentatively hopeful. I think it's a disgrace how many communities have moved from the open internet into Discord, and at least this is continuing to move towards fixing a lot of the problems that migration caused. I do wonder why they chose now though, it seems like there's potentially a lot of value in keeping this data private, or at least selling it for a fee
I'm not a fan of the change. I wanted Discord to remain it's little walled garden so I could continue to ignore it. It's a terrible experience in every way and I genuinely have zero idea why anyone uses it.
As someone who hit the PC gaming world in around 2008 online, we started with TeamSpeak and Ventrilo which were hosted platforms that allowed you to voice chat with your friends. They had cost money and weren't that great on audio quality (from that time).
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 you could probably just say "it became popular because it's free and everyone could use it to game with friends". Those of us that have fallen out of gaming or people that don't game might not literally have any idea why anyone uses it. So you could both be right. You are taking their zero to one by providing the answer.
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.
Its main draw isn't explicitly gaming, but where your social interactions more often align with that of a friend group / in a group chat dynamic where everyone's talking with everyone or hangs out together at similar times. Gaming is just how it started, because nearly all gaming groups have this sort of social dynamic. (Obviously Discord does support DMs)
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.
The platforms before discord were very bad (and still are). Discord was such a god send back then simply for being reliable free voice chat for gamers.
I don't disagree with you that Discord is the best option for voice chat now, but there was a godsend before it and that was Skype. It didn't have the equivalent of Discord “servers” but it finally solved the voice chat problem that was previously plagued with technical issues, instability and incompatibility. Discord became the godsend when Skype decided to speedrun enshittification.
Gaming was the original use-case because historically every gaming clan had a teamspeak server, a forum, and an IM group chat, each of which was a pain to set up and administer. But it just so happens that this is also a pretty good set of features for basically any kind of small-ish online community, so it's taken off across a huge number of areas (my hot take is that feature wise it's actually better than Teams/Slack/etc, especially in terms of how the voice call UX works, and inertia and general reputation/theming are the main reasons it hasn't taken off for internal company communications).
> 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?
Yes. The UI is so bad I wouldn't call it "zero friction". But it's just my opinion.
- 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.
Don’t forget the holiday “we’ve changed all of your notification sounds for the third year in a row as a forced opt in instead of an opt out, and we’ve done this across all your clients with settings that don’t follow you”.
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.
Here's an easy example. Every discord client now ships with Krisp, and many clients squelch settings were automatically changed from standard to Krisp when this feature launched.
That change was many many years ago. I personally find Krisp super efficient (no adverse CPU usage or anything) and highly useful. It's better than Apple's 'noise isolation' at not picking up e.g. sharp / fast / heavy breathing.
Discord is a mediocre chat medium - I don't mind using it, but it wouldn't be my first choice.
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
What do you find so bad about Discord's search functionality?
Because I see this complaint a lot, but I've personally never had any real problems with it, and it seems to cover pretty much all of the bases I'd want in a search for this kind of platform.
Because it's not semantic search, it's text search. You don't search Discord like you search Google, which is a problem when it is used as a wiki replacement.
It's not even text search. I can know the exact text I'm looking for and get messages that use completely different words just because Discord tries to group related words together when indexing. It's like some lobotomized collated word search, since it doesn't support symbols or quotes either.
Discord's text search is a simple intersection-of-all-words search, with some filters slapped on top. And it's not even the word you typed, it's all words that seem maybe semantically equivalent or similar. When I know the exact word I want to search for (e.g. "loves"), it sucks to always get results for every other related word (e.g. "love", "loved", "loving"). Maybe it'd be a useful feature if it had a toggle, but it doesn't. Some other words that have problems with this are time/times, caring/care, wanting/want/wants, and fucking allowance/allow/allows. Seriously?? Allowance is treated the same as allow??
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.
I assumed some ulterior motive. Did they pick the cheap option?
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?
Discord is very hard to understand for me. But the young people love it for some reason. Had to use it for some projects or hackatons, and it's still a mystery why it's so popular. No one found older links that were deeper in the chats, had to constantly tag people to see anything, random chats pushed the important information away. It was overall terrible for everyone yet everyone still loves it.
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.
Hey, I am that guy that founded that one obscure Linux distro. And yes, it is better than whatever one you use at supply chain security if nothing else. ;)
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.
> [chat]... without mandating use of a surveillance capitalism product
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.
IRC and Matrix are self hostable and end to end encrypted. There is no good reason for tech communities to lock themselves into Discord and exclude anyone that does not agree to their corporate terms of service.
IRC definitely is not E2E in practice. Matrix hasn't reached feature parity with discord at all, unfortunately (and the main server has a big spam problem for any public chat. not to mention a publicly accessible chat and E2E are kind of a contradiction in goals).
I am sure popular public Discord servers get their own share of spam, but with Matrix you can host your own, or join one of a friend you trust. That is what freedom looks like. E2EE is optional.
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.
What functionality? Someone technical can do literally anything Discord can do with FOSS tools.
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.
You _can_, but if you're running a FOSS project you probably already have a significant shortage of spare time. Most FOSS devs are not that idealistic: they want something that works and works reliably and not to be building their own platform just to be able to work on the project they actually want to work on.
> 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.
As someone who was an irc operator, I can assure you, everything from IRC was funneled into ever place it was ordered to be...
What a detailed and thoughtful point. It is "shit" so we should all use corpotools?
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.
I'll echo the general impression. Even just using Matrix for direct messaging it's not something I am going to be able to pull any of my friends onto unless they already put the privacy and openness advantages very highly. It's just a pain to use, a pain to debug, and flaky enough you often have to debug it. It certainly seems like there's a lot of effort going into it but it seems to have resulted in a lot of churn but not much polish at any level.
it sounds like you had an awful experience with a specific client and/or server combo (or perhaps multiple ones). can you share which ones? as you say, there's a lot of effort going into it, so it's important to know if impression is based on outdated knowledge or whether you or others have had a bad time with the current generation.
Element (and Element X) and the main server. I still use it daily (to message the one other person I know who uses it) but nothing makes me think it's viable as a discord replacement. (I haven't had too many problems super recently but then I haven't tried to log in on a new device for a while)
Slack and hangouts were both functionally worse than discord for a long time. I haven't used them in quite a while, but even if they have now caught up, network effect is already in play.
Also is slack free? I remember some debacle about their free tier being pretty poor.
my comment was not a claim that discord is completely unique in its offering. it was directed at the "genuinely zero idea why anyone uses it" part of the comment
It used to be. The core offering is still functional. But with every update it becomes less usable. Orbs, badges, glittery avatar borders, aggressively animated, rainbow gradient text usernames, and now ads embedded directly into the UI.
For me all these things are good except the last one (if you mean partner games in the bottom left corner, I hope they're not A/B testing Google Ads in the app). My profile is more low key but I don't hate others for going heavy on the effects. It's just self expression.
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'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.
none of that makes it less usable. That side bar where its shown is mostly just to see who is online and I found for many users, they don't even have that bar showing. The core chat/voice/streaming is just as functional as ever.
It's actually not just as functional as ever. Quality of voice and video chat took a noticeable dive this year, maybe coincidentally right as vibe coding really took off in the industry. And all that extra crap might not make discord unusable but it does suck. Like I said, not great.
Both the groups I have regular video calls with noticed, to the point that one of them switched back to zoom. It seems to have gotten better the last few months, though I don't think it's quite back to the near-flawless peak it was on in, say, 2024.
Animations from peoples' names and from their super reactions playing over other content after happening to move my mouse over them is something I'd consider a slight usability issue.
Discord is my favorite communication platform on the internet. It combines everything useful that was offered by older platforms like IRC, Skype and TeamSpeak, and provides that with a modern UI.
For me, it also helps that all of my favorite communities are on it.
could you be specific? It has pockmarks for sure. tacky upsells, cringy gamification, horrible resource consumption (mine runs at like 800mb of ram or more). Oh yeah inconvenient updates.
but still probably the best signal/noise community experience out there. and great customizations.
"it's a disgrace how many communities have moved from the open internet into Discord"
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.
The "open web" is still just websites. The fact that the 5 major websites decided to become algorithmic silos does not mean something like Discord has no place on it, or any of the other billions of websites for that matter.
It's almost like there are different-sized Discords out there, and some people (e.g. you) use only the small ones, while other people are different, and some of them use large Discords.
Don't forget why this happened. Discourse and opinions counter to the narrative pulled people away from public discussion due to fear or reprisal / issues.
Reddit outside of some niche subs still largely deals with global thought policing.
I'm on 3 high school and 5 college servers. It's not just for games. Most companies won't use it for work because they have a pretty bad security record and no enterprise features, but it's perfect for any small to mid size community.
I'm in 1 Discord for Gaming, the rest (about 45) are all non gaming related (though discussions sometimes happen). Including AI, Development, Art, Music, etc. I think Discord has a wider audience that many aren't aware of.
Right. Many communities and project teams saw a real need for an IRC replacement, whether literally or not, and Discord was the least bad choice simply by existing. And IRC channels were of course just as un-googlable without setting up a logging bot and a crawlable archive.
Not necessarily because they were scared, but probably a lot of them got banned or saw their friends get banned from Reddit, and couldn't get back on because Reddit has quite strong detection for ban evaders, so after the initial anger period, Reddit just disappeared from their mind altogether.
You can openly be a white supremacist on Twitter now. The reason some people still aren't happy is because what they really want is to be able to have terrible opinions and not be disliked and shunned, which isn't possible. Social repercussions and censorship are different things.
Discord is popular because a very significant amount of people prefer the casual social instant chatting aspect over the slower threaded style of forums, especially young people.
I feel that the faster and more ephemeral flow of irc always skewed older than the (mostly game related) forums I frequented though. Perhaps the age clustering around different media across niches is mostly just dependent on what was the most conveniently accessible when the niche gained broader popularity within an age group?
Newer platforms will tend to skew younger for sure. I was too young to get into irc really but even when I was young instant messaging services like MSN Messenger were vastly more mainstream than forums. So maybe it's not really based on age.
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.
I don't think this is true for most people on the big issues but do think it's true for a lot of small issues. Reddit (and HN) lead to a lot of pageant show dynamics where the people with the time to hit the buttons decide what content to boost. Small Discord communities are free from that.
Counter to 'the narrative' or not, the twitter approach to social media means there's always a risk of suddenly gaining a lot of negative attention, and the 'global town square' approach seems to actively encourage that kind of thing to happen. It's not surprising people got tired of it, and it doesn't require some grand conspiracy towards or against a particular set of beliefs.
On Reddit for example most of the popular subs would ban you for saying Israel's doing a genocide, even if it's relevant to the thread topic, e.g. if the topic is a news post about USA sending money to Israel.
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".
Hell, some of the dev groups ban any discussion of USING llm's in code development. It's intentionally alienating and driving people away. Many of which I have found on Discord. Though even Discord seems to be having a moment of thought policing.
> 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!
I don't think it's necessary "welcomed by all actors involved". For sure most smaller discord servers don't want to be public, but then this change doesn't affect them anyhow. It would be nice, in some cases (like a discord server that is the main support channel for an application) to have that more indexable and searchable by others.
It however brings disadvantages with it. Specifically if now instead of a forum you have to join five trillion discord servers just to get help with your one issue on "this niche product i use".
I "own" a Discord server for my WoW guild and I'm not particularly happy about being on it, but it's the default choice for gamers and voice chat. It would kill our raid team's recruiting if we told people they had to install some obscure service instead of Discord if they wanted to raid with us.
I'm a Discord server admin and I'd love to turn this on because having more discussion of my game indexable by search engines seems like a good thing in general. For new messages it seems like there's no problem, in combination with the opt-out option. But for existing users, how am I supposed to disclose the change to people? What if people posted content in the past and wouldn't want it on Google, but aren't active anymore?
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.
The same as with introduction of indexing web pages by any search engine few decades ago, if you posted on a forum that was public accessible, your posts were indexed without your input.
Not a fan of it requiring a certain number of members/level of activity/server status. My experience is that many of the communities hit hardest by Discord's login requirements aren't all that large, like speedrun communities for niche games, modding and ROM hacking communities for certain games, etc.
I feel like it should be opt in/out regardless of the size of the server and amount of activity it has.
This is tied to the "community server" feature, which was always a way to force some rules they couldn't change for existing servers, so you have to accept them before you can enable fatures like this.
I'm always so conflicted about editing article titles like this for posts. I stick to original titles since that's the rules but it's tempting not to every time I see a post hit front page with good hooks edited in. These edits clearly work and rarely seem to be punished.
This is needed, but likely not enough yet. With the rise of Discord servers as community forums, we've lost the wealth of Q&A they used to provide. Being able to search for a user with the same issue as you and find it was no small part of what's let us all learn to program in the first place, as well as critical to the training data that powers the AIs we use to answer similar questions more quickly.
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.
The real risk here isn't AI training - It's deanonymization. People posted in a "private" community under nicknames.
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.
This is only for public servers. If you were using a nickname on _public servers_ that was easy to identify before, then that was already a big mistake.
And this feature does not affect old messages - only ones after December 2026.
The only thing server owners control is whether the server is public or not. They can’t set this particular aspect of it on or off, only individual users can.
As for turning a public server private or vice versa, that’s a very noticeable and impactful decision in lots of ways already.
server owners have setting toggles to opt the server out of having public facing channel history or ai channel summaries. a server can remain discoverable and have the history and summaries off for the public webpage of the server.
It's not just that. It brings with it all the SEO bullshit that places like Reddit have. Everything has to be over moderated because it's a target for SEO spam.
i think this is good. i miss old forums, and i do want information accessible like it was in the old forum days.
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.)
It's about time! I wish Slack would offer this feature too for people who want it. I think it's going to be great for open-source, open-communication types of projects and organizations and it's well needed for the world!
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.
For channels with over 1000 members. I think you have to opt in for your server to be discoverable. Looks like the public message feature is opt out rather than opt in if the server is discoverable.
I really like discord. This seems like a good move, there is plenty of information locked inside discord at the moment. For instance I'm part of the Wooting keyboard discord and there's a lot info there on problem solving, customizing, etc. There are tons of other discords like this, especially for games. I personally have a dota2 guild discord, but none of these are likely to be searchable as mostly they are private (often with public invite links somewhere) and don't have many users (I think mines at 180ish).
There's a big difference between the two. For a lot of people on Discord, the fact that the communities are not public is a big feature. That they're sharing information with one company is a much less significant issue (though I agree, it would be better to have a platform that required less).
(That said, I think the fear is a little overblown and borne out of a general distrust of the direction discord is going.)
Interesting, thanks for the clarification. I am on a vpn, so yeah, my IP is probably flagged. But disconnecting from the vpn is not exactly a good trade-off either.
Sure, but privacy-conscious individuals can simply not participate in those servers. The person I was replying to was acting like you have to give up your phone number to use Discord at all.
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.
This seems like it would alleviate part of the concern I see on HN a lot regarding open source projects keeping their knowledge bases on isolated and unsearchable discord servers. It's still on a proprietary platform but this might be an improvement overall.
This is a very important and good change. Currently Discord communities are black holes of information.
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.
Fluxer has special "forum" areas that are meant to be searchable on the global web, and discussions in chat channels are private. Which is a much better approach for that issue than Discord "make every message from public servers searchable" imo.
It's already self-hostable witha single-client connection ability, and there's ongoing work to make the Fluxer site and all of the self-hosted servers able to federate (with a prototype planned for the end of the year)
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)
Just as friendly feedback, monospace fonts are difficult to read for me for that kind of content. The site also doesn’t explain what it is about. It says “terminal-grade communities” (whatever that means), but Fluxer doesn’t seem to be bound to terminals?
> Just as friendly feedback, monospace fonts are difficult to read for me for that kind of content.
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.
I was like "Poob? Are we just making shit up now?"
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.
The FAQ at the bottom of the article says it'll default to off for people in the EU, the UK, Canada, Brazil, Australia, and South Korea. Are you in one of those places?
Ah thanks for the correction! And yes I'm on that list. I just heard that and was coming back to make a correction so I'm happy to hear someone got to it before me.
I would love to see the numbers on the shift in engagement on discord that would have otherwise occurred on reddit back before the Great Mod War of 2020. Digital nomads collapse tents and move to more hospitable land. My reading of the gestalt of reddit right now is that there aren't enough active users contributing original bespoke content. Not like they used to. Of course there's always plausible deniability, but I think I'm reading the room correctly here.
Unlike so many people here, I think discord not being indexed by search engine is pretty OK and is even a feature. All other spaces of internet have been invaded by bots, astroturfing, sucking every single bit of data possible... The more the data is easily scrapable, the more it enshittifies everything around it. Moreover people don't behave the same knowing that something is private vs something is public (yes things are mostly public on discord, but at least there's a sense that someone has to actively look for your messages instead of having them indexed by default)
Discord has been available for training data for at least some months. I used duckduckgo to search information on my gamertag and whichever AI they were using at the time came up with results that would have only been available had it used Discord's data.
That's my read on it, they might use this to treat these messages as public information to be packaged and resold like how Reddit can rather than it being a place where people have an expectation of privacy.
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)
I don't like how information is siloed in discord but making this change retroactively is dangerous. And the option to opt out is only useful to those who know about it.
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
I think that it can be a good change depending on how you interpret it but suppose it becomes part of Google search engine then, wouldn't it allow Google's AI quick summary to search/scrape that and have it part of training process
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.
>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.
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.
> they aren't opening up to google specifically. any search engine will be able to index the content on the server web pages.
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!
This is very bad, due to the fact that, while Discord is used as private and server messaging app/website, it could expose secrets that users might be telling people in their private chat.
I'm tentatively hopeful. I think it's a disgrace how many communities have moved from the open internet into Discord, and at least this is continuing to move towards fixing a lot of the problems that migration caused. I do wonder why they chose now though, it seems like there's potentially a lot of value in keeping this data private, or at least selling it for a fee
I'm not a fan of the change. I wanted Discord to remain it's little walled garden so I could continue to ignore it. It's a terrible experience in every way and I genuinely have zero idea why anyone uses it.
As someone who hit the PC gaming world in around 2008 online, we started with TeamSpeak and Ventrilo which were hosted platforms that allowed you to voice chat with your friends. They had cost money and weren't that great on audio quality (from that time).
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.
>I genuinely have zero idea why anyone uses it.
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 you could probably just say "it became popular because it's free and everyone could use it to game with friends". Those of us that have fallen out of gaming or people that don't game might not literally have any idea why anyone uses it. So you could both be right. You are taking their zero to one by providing the answer.
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.
Its main draw isn't explicitly gaming, but where your social interactions more often align with that of a friend group / in a group chat dynamic where everyone's talking with everyone or hangs out together at similar times. Gaming is just how it started, because nearly all gaming groups have this sort of social dynamic. (Obviously Discord does support DMs)
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.
Out of 24 discord servers I am on, only 4 are related to games.
Most are software related, or why not genealogy or mesh networking?
I never started using discord for gaming, I just find its everywhere.
The platforms before discord were very bad (and still are). Discord was such a god send back then simply for being reliable free voice chat for gamers.
I don't disagree with you that Discord is the best option for voice chat now, but there was a godsend before it and that was Skype. It didn't have the equivalent of Discord “servers” but it finally solved the voice chat problem that was previously plagued with technical issues, instability and incompatibility. Discord became the godsend when Skype decided to speedrun enshittification.
There are discord communities around hobbies and shared interests that have nothing to do with gaming and have thousands of users.
But half the good is that they are not some wide-open, forever-indexed forum like reddit.
Gaming was the original use-case because historically every gaming clan had a teamspeak server, a forum, and an IM group chat, each of which was a pain to set up and administer. But it just so happens that this is also a pretty good set of features for basically any kind of small-ish online community, so it's taken off across a huge number of areas (my hot take is that feature wise it's actually better than Teams/Slack/etc, especially in terms of how the voice call UX works, and inertia and general reputation/theming are the main reasons it hasn't taken off for internal company communications).
> 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?
Yes. The UI is so bad I wouldn't call it "zero friction". But it's just my opinion.
The UI has lots of issues everywhere and constantly, but unfortunately it's by far the best if you look at the competition.
It certainly started that way, but the bloat is getting horrendous. Having said that, I still use it weekly.
what bloat? unless you're specifically looking for it, default view has none of it, it's just chat, video and memes
In vaguely-non-chronological order
- 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.
You forgot the “what’s new” popup every time you launch the app
Don’t forget the holiday “we’ve changed all of your notification sounds for the third year in a row as a forced opt in instead of an opt out, and we’ve done this across all your clients with settings that don’t follow you”.
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.
I remember that! It's like they know users don't care, but try to make a joke about it instead of taking it to heart. Annoying narcissist shit.
Here's an easy example. Every discord client now ships with Krisp, and many clients squelch settings were automatically changed from standard to Krisp when this feature launched.
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040843952-K...
That change was many many years ago. I personally find Krisp super efficient (no adverse CPU usage or anything) and highly useful. It's better than Apple's 'noise isolation' at not picking up e.g. sharp / fast / heavy breathing.
Do you even use Discord? Is this comment satire? Discord is loaded with ads, upsells, spyware, and straight scams all throughout its UI.
Not quite. It has higher friction than forums.
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
forums do not have voice chat or screensharing.
i did not claim it is "lower friction for text-only searches than forums" or anything of that sort.
It's still horrible software
i think a certain brand of hackernews user just likes being completely obtuse in a bid for superiority.
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.
Discord is a mediocre chat medium - I don't mind using it, but it wouldn't be my first choice.
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
What do you find so bad about Discord's search functionality? Because I see this complaint a lot, but I've personally never had any real problems with it, and it seems to cover pretty much all of the bases I'd want in a search for this kind of platform.
Because it's not semantic search, it's text search. You don't search Discord like you search Google, which is a problem when it is used as a wiki replacement.
It's not even text search. I can know the exact text I'm looking for and get messages that use completely different words just because Discord tries to group related words together when indexing. It's like some lobotomized collated word search, since it doesn't support symbols or quotes either.
Discord's text search is a simple intersection-of-all-words search, with some filters slapped on top. And it's not even the word you typed, it's all words that seem maybe semantically equivalent or similar. When I know the exact word I want to search for (e.g. "loves"), it sucks to always get results for every other related word (e.g. "love", "loved", "loving"). Maybe it'd be a useful feature if it had a toggle, but it doesn't. Some other words that have problems with this are time/times, caring/care, wanting/want/wants, and fucking allowance/allow/allows. Seriously?? Allowance is treated the same as allow??
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.
THIS. It pisses me off to no end and it seems like something they’re totally uniniterested in fixing.
I assumed some ulterior motive. Did they pick the cheap option?
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?
My guess is it was better than nothing and they have incredible scale to deal with. (Like millions of messages per second scale.)
But NixOS is not obscure once you get into it.
Few things are.
Discord is very hard to understand for me. But the young people love it for some reason. Had to use it for some projects or hackatons, and it's still a mystery why it's so popular. No one found older links that were deeper in the chats, had to constantly tag people to see anything, random chats pushed the important information away. It was overall terrible for everyone yet everyone still loves it.
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.
Hey, I am that guy that founded that one obscure Linux distro. And yes, it is better than whatever one you use at supply chain security if nothing else. ;)
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.
> [chat]... without mandating use of a surveillance capitalism product
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.
IRC and Matrix are self hostable and end to end encrypted. There is no good reason for tech communities to lock themselves into Discord and exclude anyone that does not agree to their corporate terms of service.
IRC definitely is not E2E in practice. Matrix hasn't reached feature parity with discord at all, unfortunately (and the main server has a big spam problem for any public chat. not to mention a publicly accessible chat and E2E are kind of a contradiction in goals).
I am sure popular public Discord servers get their own share of spam, but with Matrix you can host your own, or join one of a friend you trust. That is what freedom looks like. E2EE is optional.
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.
Sure, I'm just pointing out that you're going to be losing a lot of functionality that way and it seems most people would prefer the functionality.
What functionality? Someone technical can do literally anything Discord can do with FOSS tools.
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.
You _can_, but if you're running a FOSS project you probably already have a significant shortage of spare time. Most FOSS devs are not that idealistic: they want something that works and works reliably and not to be building their own platform just to be able to work on the project they actually want to work on.
You have a misunderstanding of the value the service provides for the larger market.
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!
> 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.
As someone who was an irc operator, I can assure you, everything from IRC was funneled into ever place it was ordered to be...
I have been an IRC operator for over 25 years, and never funneled any data to any third parties.
That is the beauty of open systems. One can choose an operator that reflects their values.
> Matrix
Is a piece of shit with awful UX.
What a detailed and thoughtful point. It is "shit" so we should all use corpotools?
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.
I'll echo the general impression. Even just using Matrix for direct messaging it's not something I am going to be able to pull any of my friends onto unless they already put the privacy and openness advantages very highly. It's just a pain to use, a pain to debug, and flaky enough you often have to debug it. It certainly seems like there's a lot of effort going into it but it seems to have resulted in a lot of churn but not much polish at any level.
it sounds like you had an awful experience with a specific client and/or server combo (or perhaps multiple ones). can you share which ones? as you say, there's a lot of effort going into it, so it's important to know if impression is based on outdated knowledge or whether you or others have had a bad time with the current generation.
Element (and Element X) and the main server. I still use it daily (to message the one other person I know who uses it) but nothing makes me think it's viable as a discord replacement. (I haven't had too many problems super recently but then I haven't tried to log in on a new device for a while)
Matrix sucks. The ecosystem.
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.
yep, many previous discussions on discord tend to result in many HNers poo pooing discord. All the things they say would happen never happened.
so…slack? hangouts? the plethora of options?
Slack and hangouts were both functionally worse than discord for a long time. I haven't used them in quite a while, but even if they have now caught up, network effect is already in play.
Also is slack free? I remember some debacle about their free tier being pretty poor.
my comment was not a claim that discord is completely unique in its offering. it was directed at the "genuinely zero idea why anyone uses it" part of the comment
> low-friction
is the key here
the same reason WhatsApp and Telegram won on their markets
Because it's actually a good experience in some ways. I mean, it's not great, but as a chat room it's fine.
It used to be. The core offering is still functional. But with every update it becomes less usable. Orbs, badges, glittery avatar borders, aggressively animated, rainbow gradient text usernames, and now ads embedded directly into the UI.
For me all these things are good except the last one (if you mean partner games in the bottom left corner, I hope they're not A/B testing Google Ads in the app). My profile is more low key but I don't hate others for going heavy on the effects. It's just self expression.
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.
> no official export tools.
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.
none of that makes it less usable. That side bar where its shown is mostly just to see who is online and I found for many users, they don't even have that bar showing. The core chat/voice/streaming is just as functional as ever.
It's actually not just as functional as ever. Quality of voice and video chat took a noticeable dive this year, maybe coincidentally right as vibe coding really took off in the industry. And all that extra crap might not make discord unusable but it does suck. Like I said, not great.
I haven't noticed that.
Both the groups I have regular video calls with noticed, to the point that one of them switched back to zoom. It seems to have gotten better the last few months, though I don't think it's quite back to the near-flawless peak it was on in, say, 2024.
Animations from peoples' names and from their super reactions playing over other content after happening to move my mouse over them is something I'd consider a slight usability issue.
FWIW there are settings (maybe in the accessibility section) to avoid playing animations until you've actually clicked on something.
That stuff is so easy to ignore I struggle to understand how it could make it unusable
Yeah most the channels I'm in are meant to be forum replacements and it's terrible at that.
Chat room is fine though.
It feels like overmonitized free to play Slack.
Discord is my favorite communication platform on the internet. It combines everything useful that was offered by older platforms like IRC, Skype and TeamSpeak, and provides that with a modern UI.
For me, it also helps that all of my favorite communities are on it.
To communicate with each other.
could you be specific? It has pockmarks for sure. tacky upsells, cringy gamification, horrible resource consumption (mine runs at like 800mb of ram or more). Oh yeah inconvenient updates.
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.
"it's a disgrace how many communities have moved from the open internet into Discord"
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.
The "open web" is still just websites. The fact that the 5 major websites decided to become algorithmic silos does not mean something like Discord has no place on it, or any of the other billions of websites for that matter.
It's almost like there are different-sized Discords out there, and some people (e.g. you) use only the small ones, while other people are different, and some of them use large Discords.
It's to get more users. This is only applying to servers meant to be public, which is probably already getting scraped
Don't forget why this happened. Discourse and opinions counter to the narrative pulled people away from public discussion due to fear or reprisal / issues.
Reddit outside of some niche subs still largely deals with global thought policing.
I'd say the evidence rather strongly suggests people are mostly going to discord to talk about video games and share anime art.
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.
I'm on 3 high school and 5 college servers. It's not just for games. Most companies won't use it for work because they have a pretty bad security record and no enterprise features, but it's perfect for any small to mid size community.
That it is used for other things is not in dispute by anyone.
I'm in 1 Discord for Gaming, the rest (about 45) are all non gaming related (though discussions sometimes happen). Including AI, Development, Art, Music, etc. I think Discord has a wider audience that many aren't aware of.
Sure, but there are listings of the most popular Discords. Just scroll through them: https://top.gg/discord/servers/list/largest
The themes are pretty clear, and having a political discussion does not appear prominent.
im pretty sure most people moved to discord because it is easy and has a lot of nice features, not because they were scared of global thought police
Right. Many communities and project teams saw a real need for an IRC replacement, whether literally or not, and Discord was the least bad choice simply by existing. And IRC channels were of course just as un-googlable without setting up a logging bot and a crawlable archive.
Not necessarily because they were scared, but probably a lot of them got banned or saw their friends get banned from Reddit, and couldn't get back on because Reddit has quite strong detection for ban evaders, so after the initial anger period, Reddit just disappeared from their mind altogether.
You can openly be a white supremacist on Twitter now. The reason some people still aren't happy is because what they really want is to be able to have terrible opinions and not be disliked and shunned, which isn't possible. Social repercussions and censorship are different things.
I've found that people with terrible opinions aren't happy to stay in their own groups. They want to be part of the nice groups.
But they sure are upset now that Discord bans accounts based on reports to its thought police.
Both things can be true.
i doubt it is true for the majority, though.
in any case, i dont think the "hunter biden laptop" discord group is opting into this feature.
Discord is popular because a very significant amount of people prefer the casual social instant chatting aspect over the slower threaded style of forums, especially young people.
I feel that the faster and more ephemeral flow of irc always skewed older than the (mostly game related) forums I frequented though. Perhaps the age clustering around different media across niches is mostly just dependent on what was the most conveniently accessible when the niche gained broader popularity within an age group?
Newer platforms will tend to skew younger for sure. I was too young to get into irc really but even when I was young instant messaging services like MSN Messenger were vastly more mainstream than forums. So maybe it's not really based on age.
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.
Lemmy seems the likely reddit replacement, so much so that many Lemmy comments report it is forbidden to mention on reddit.
https://lemmy.world
I don't think this is true for most people on the big issues but do think it's true for a lot of small issues. Reddit (and HN) lead to a lot of pageant show dynamics where the people with the time to hit the buttons decide what content to boost. Small Discord communities are free from that.
That's not at all why my WoW guild moved to Discord.
Counter to 'the narrative' or not, the twitter approach to social media means there's always a risk of suddenly gaining a lot of negative attention, and the 'global town square' approach seems to actively encourage that kind of thing to happen. It's not surprising people got tired of it, and it doesn't require some grand conspiracy towards or against a particular set of beliefs.
Do you have an example of opinions that are counter to the narrative that faced reprisal?
On Reddit for example most of the popular subs would ban you for saying Israel's doing a genocide, even if it's relevant to the thread topic, e.g. if the topic is a news post about USA sending money to Israel.
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".
Hell, some of the dev groups ban any discussion of USING llm's in code development. It's intentionally alienating and driving people away. Many of which I have found on Discord. Though even Discord seems to be having a moment of thought policing.
Discussion of Linux has been forbidden on /r/opensource because there's AI generated code in it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/1xfursg/adjustm... That's not true, their rules are unclear and problematic, but they specifically didn't ban Linux.
That's just wild.
I actually see the point of discord as the fact that it is less public.
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.
It's a disgrace what the "open" internet has become.
>many communities have moved from the open internet into Discord
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)
> 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!
I don't think it's necessary "welcomed by all actors involved". For sure most smaller discord servers don't want to be public, but then this change doesn't affect them anyhow. It would be nice, in some cases (like a discord server that is the main support channel for an application) to have that more indexable and searchable by others.
It however brings disadvantages with it. Specifically if now instead of a forum you have to join five trillion discord servers just to get help with your one issue on "this niche product i use".
I "own" a Discord server for my WoW guild and I'm not particularly happy about being on it, but it's the default choice for gamers and voice chat. It would kill our raid team's recruiting if we told people they had to install some obscure service instead of Discord if they wanted to raid with us.
These are just network effects.
I'm a Discord server admin and I'd love to turn this on because having more discussion of my game indexable by search engines seems like a good thing in general. For new messages it seems like there's no problem, in combination with the opt-out option. But for existing users, how am I supposed to disclose the change to people? What if people posted content in the past and wouldn't want it on Google, but aren't active anymore?
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.
> What if people posted content in the past and wouldn't want it on Google, but aren't active anymore?
"Messages from before mid-December 2026 aren’t included, regardless of your setting." Seems like they thought of this, at least.
The same as with introduction of indexing web pages by any search engine few decades ago, if you posted on a forum that was public accessible, your posts were indexed without your input.
Not a fan of it requiring a certain number of members/level of activity/server status. My experience is that many of the communities hit hardest by Discord's login requirements aren't all that large, like speedrun communities for niche games, modding and ROM hacking communities for certain games, etc.
I feel like it should be opt in/out regardless of the size of the server and amount of activity it has.
This is tied to the "community server" feature, which was always a way to force some rules they couldn't change for existing servers, so you have to accept them before you can enable fatures like this.
I tried looking for specific numbers on this, were they mentioned anywhere?
"Discoverable Servers are the most public spaces on Discord, with at least 1,000 members" from the linked source.
Just to note that Google is not mentioned in the title and indeed nowhere in the article. Searching the web is broader than 'google'.
I'm always so conflicted about editing article titles like this for posts. I stick to original titles since that's the rules but it's tempting not to every time I see a post hit front page with good hooks edited in. These edits clearly work and rarely seem to be punished.
Wonder if HN would’ve penalized it less w/original title https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=50263854
"through *googling* " might've been a better phrasing
It's like every smartphone is an iPhone, in the parlance of headlines. It's fewer letters.
According to many parents, every game console is a Nintendo.
There is only google
This is needed, but likely not enough yet. With the rise of Discord servers as community forums, we've lost the wealth of Q&A they used to provide. Being able to search for a user with the same issue as you and find it was no small part of what's let us all learn to program in the first place, as well as critical to the training data that powers the AIs we use to answer similar questions more quickly.
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.
The real risk here isn't AI training - It's deanonymization. People posted in a "private" community under nicknames.
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.
This is only for public servers. If you were using a nickname on _public servers_ that was easy to identify before, then that was already a big mistake.
And this feature does not affect old messages - only ones after December 2026.
The only thing server owners control is whether the server is public or not. They can’t set this particular aspect of it on or off, only individual users can.
As for turning a public server private or vice versa, that’s a very noticeable and impactful decision in lots of ways already.
server owners have setting toggles to opt the server out of having public facing channel history or ai channel summaries. a server can remain discoverable and have the history and summaries off for the public webpage of the server.
It's not just that. It brings with it all the SEO bullshit that places like Reddit have. Everything has to be over moderated because it's a target for SEO spam.
i think this is good. i miss old forums, and i do want information accessible like it was in the old forum days.
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.)
It's about time! I wish Slack would offer this feature too for people who want it. I think it's going to be great for open-source, open-communication types of projects and organizations and it's well needed for the world!
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.
For channels with over 1000 members. I think you have to opt in for your server to be discoverable. Looks like the public message feature is opt out rather than opt in if the server is discoverable.
I really like discord. This seems like a good move, there is plenty of information locked inside discord at the moment. For instance I'm part of the Wooting keyboard discord and there's a lot info there on problem solving, customizing, etc. There are tons of other discords like this, especially for games. I personally have a dota2 guild discord, but none of these are likely to be searchable as mostly they are private (often with public invite links somewhere) and don't have many users (I think mines at 180ish).
Funny to see the differences in reaction to this on various communities. Privacy fears, locked down Internet, what a diverse set of views.
Privacy fears from people who didn't see the irony of surrendering their phone number to a company to chat with someone on the Internet.
There's a big difference between the two. For a lot of people on Discord, the fact that the communities are not public is a big feature. That they're sharing information with one company is a much less significant issue (though I agree, it would be better to have a platform that required less).
(That said, I think the fear is a little overblown and borne out of a general distrust of the direction discord is going.)
Discord doesn't require a phone number by default. My experience is that it only does if your IP is flagged.
Interesting, thanks for the clarification. I am on a vpn, so yeah, my IP is probably flagged. But disconnecting from the vpn is not exactly a good trade-off either.
Individual servers can require it
Sure, but privacy-conscious individuals can simply not participate in those servers. The person I was replying to was acting like you have to give up your phone number to use Discord at all.
This is a fun one isnt it.
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.
This seems like it would alleviate part of the concern I see on HN a lot regarding open source projects keeping their knowledge bases on isolated and unsearchable discord servers. It's still on a proprietary platform but this might be an improvement overall.
This is a very important and good change. Currently Discord communities are black holes of information.
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.
Fluxer is what people should look at if they're trying to get off discord.
Do Fluxer, etc., solve the problem of discoverability that this is supposed to help with? Or is it just a not-closed platform?
Fluxer has special "forum" areas that are meant to be searchable on the global web, and discussions in chat channels are private. Which is a much better approach for that issue than Discord "make every message from public servers searchable" imo.
Oh, that feels much nicer.
https://github.com/fluxerapp/fluxer
I would suggest IRC but apparently typing and reading text is a non-starter for many.
X app/thing sucks now that they added Z
Try new Y thing! it doesn't do annoying Z thing!
Oh no, Y added annoying Z thing! how come nobody saw this coming :(
While this is typically true, see X to BlueSky when it comes to AI, Fluxer is open-source and self-hostable.
phpBB!
why Flxuer and not any of the other dozen or so replacements that have been mentioned every time a discord thread pops up?
It's already self-hostable witha single-client connection ability, and there's ongoing work to make the Fluxer site and all of the self-hosted servers able to federate (with a prototype planned for the end of the year)
Fluxer is amazing.
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)
Just as friendly feedback, monospace fonts are difficult to read for me for that kind of content. The site also doesn’t explain what it is about. It says “terminal-grade communities” (whatever that means), but Fluxer doesn’t seem to be bound to terminals?
> Just as friendly feedback, monospace fonts are difficult to read for me for that kind of content.
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
How does it compare to Zulip?
How does Discord compare to Zulip? Fluxer is functionally equivalent to Discord from a users perspective.
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.
> Discord, Zulip, Fluxer
It's on Poob. Poob has it for you.
I was like "Poob? Are we just making shit up now?"
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.
Both are great options. Easy to self-host. The difference is that luxer has a more modern UI maybe
You can opt out at an account level. I just checked and I'm already opted out so it seems like it might be using your previous data opt out settings.
The FAQ at the bottom of the article says it'll default to off for people in the EU, the UK, Canada, Brazil, Australia, and South Korea. Are you in one of those places?
Ah thanks for the correction! And yes I'm on that list. I just heard that and was coming back to make a correction so I'm happy to hear someone got to it before me.
I would love to see the numbers on the shift in engagement on discord that would have otherwise occurred on reddit back before the Great Mod War of 2020. Digital nomads collapse tents and move to more hospitable land. My reading of the gestalt of reddit right now is that there aren't enough active users contributing original bespoke content. Not like they used to. Of course there's always plausible deniability, but I think I'm reading the room correctly here.
Unlike so many people here, I think discord not being indexed by search engine is pretty OK and is even a feature. All other spaces of internet have been invaded by bots, astroturfing, sucking every single bit of data possible... The more the data is easily scrapable, the more it enshittifies everything around it. Moreover people don't behave the same knowing that something is private vs something is public (yes things are mostly public on discord, but at least there's a sense that someone has to actively look for your messages instead of having them indexed by default)
Maybe I'm jaded. Is this discord announcing that it is entering the training data business?
Discord has been available for training data for at least some months. I used duckduckgo to search information on my gamertag and whichever AI they were using at the time came up with results that would have only been available had it used Discord's data.
That's my read on it, they might use this to treat these messages as public information to be packaged and resold like how Reddit can rather than it being a place where people have an expectation of privacy.
Low key privacy violated
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
Discord is ok once you get used to it. But golly the various settings panels is a scattered confusing mess, beware.
Hopefully it won't turn discord into Reddit where everything is over moderated because of all the SEO spam.
The open internet is so back. But also I'm very worried for my privacy :)
I've never gotten into using Discord because I find the interface to be way too busy.
Well that is honestly a good thing in my book as long as everyone knows when a chat is public.
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.
I don't like how information is siloed in discord but making this change retroactively is dangerous. And the option to opt out is only useful to those who know about it.
Cool, but when will Google let anyone find public website content effectively?
Google is going to be the reddit and discord search tool. It's useless for everything else.
How about private channels?
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
Maybe someone will vibecode a replacement.
Let's find a new thing to enshittify
1) Bring people on Discord
2) put ads on Discord
3) Enshittify.
I think that it can be a good change depending on how you interpret it but suppose it becomes part of Google search engine then, wouldn't it allow Google's AI quick summary to search/scrape that and have it part of training process
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*
>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.
>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.
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.
> they aren't opening up to google specifically. any search engine will be able to index the content on the server web pages.
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!
This is very bad, due to the fact that, while Discord is used as private and server messaging app/website, it could expose secrets that users might be telling people in their private chat.
This only applies to servers that are "Discoverable". Servers need to opt in to this, and there are minimum user counts for the feature in question.
Needless to say, none of this applies to your server with 15 people in it.