Probably our only chance to find solutions to problems with open source software that uses Discord as their forum
this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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Seriously. It's beyond painful when some open source project only uses Discord for communication. You have to hope that you post your question at a time when the right people are online, and that there's not a more interesting conversation going on, otherwise it just gets lost. Index that whole dataset.
Given some similar issues, why is it some projects still use IRC then?
there's a difference between using irc for livetime troubleshooting and not having a forum at all and directing everyone to your livechat discord. i'm sure some sicko out there has run an OSS project on only IRC, but their project likely got no traction because a history of problemsolving posts is important in open source. generally speaking, you need:
- a wiki
- a static indexable searchable forum
- a live chat place for real time communication for novel problems
too many projects these days only have that last one in the form of discord
Because IRC is awesome, always has been
That would be equally annoying. Probably a better signal to noise ratio on IRC though; Discord descends into memes almost instantly.
For projects I am involved with all irc chats are archived and searchable. There is nothing private, no registration needed and searchable.
Quite a bit different.
I've always wanted to contribute to The Cutting Room Floor wiki but they hide registration behind a Discord server bot that will give the registration code.
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I spent nearly three hours today between discord and matrix trying to figure out how to get these two pieces of software to talk using a certain protocol.
Imagine if there were online indexable platforms where people could publish this information so it’s easily accessible rather than having to scour through message logs hoping to find the right keywords. Such a technology surely doesn’t exist already, right?
I hate discord.
I don't hate Discord, I simply hate that so many projects and companies have unanimously decided to use it as the wrong tool for the wrong job.
It's fine for its intended use case, which is bickering with my friends about video games and fiction, and spamming each other with .gifs and meme images.
Discord is genuinely a great tool for what I used to use Skype for. Talking to my friends, and sharing dumb memes with them in a groupchat format. Companies need to learn that using it as a forum, a Q&A service, a wiki or any other information sharing purpose, is simply fucking retarded.
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Yeah, but then you have something like when people protest deleted their history on reddit which is fine as a protest tactic but leaves a hole where your specific question came up but now there's nothing there.
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Lol, I've read this headline and thought "thank fuck, probably the only option to have Discord's content readable", I like how universal this opinion is
So basically discord finally got a usable search. I count that as a win.
Well yeah, it's not encrypted. It would be the same as 10 years of Reddit posts or Lemmy posts scraped
This isn't even them scraping private chats and small servers, they just scraped public servers in the discovery tab. None of that information was ever private, and every user can browse the chat history there.
Yeah, exactly. It may sound scary or like a violation of privacy, but there is no privacy when posting to public online areas.
"Researchers scrape thousands of hours of news footage from their TVs!" is about as big a deal, honestly.
In other words-- your sexting is safe, friends.
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There's literally no difference. Each Discord server is like a tiny chunk of Reddit. If anyone expected any privacy on these servers, they're nuts.
It's indeed not a miracle.
I see a lot of drama here in the thread, people decrying data leaks, how Discord is very very bad, and a number of people wanting the "good old days" of forums.
Yes. I like forums too, but, uh...
These researchers scraped publicly posted messages. Keyword here being "public". How would anything similarly public, like a forum, be better?
I actually remember the times when forums were at their peak. I hung out on BZPower for Bionicle things, and the Relic News Forum for Homeworld modding. You know what they had? Google bots that scraped messages, looked for certain words, and populated websites with advertisements based on what it could scrape from forums.
Pretty sure Lemmy doesn't do encryption either, unless there's some very special, private Lemmy server that nobody has access to. So the researchers could've just as well scraped the fediverse.
Yeah this being just as easy on bb forums or literally any webpage with a public comment section was my first thought as well..
Isn't most of the internet scraped anyways, by the internet archive? The concerning part is that this is 100% going to be used to train some coomer brained AI. Scraping, botting, scamming: all those things are going to happen on large public communities.
Yeah, a lot of this push is about ushering in new laws to prevent data scraping.
Propaganda spreads easily through fake accounts—but how do we detect large-scale operations if they’re constantly creating and deleting accounts or trying to blend in with the rest of us? We’d need access to massive data sets to mine for patterns and expose coordinated behavior.
But the powers that benefit from shaping the narrative are the same ones pushing the idea that all scraping is bad. They want people to hate it, so they can justify laws that lock down access. That’s the end game.
How would anything similarly public, like a forum, be better?
Forums were the primary way that groups would talk with one another pre-global scale social media.
They could contain public subforums, but the majority of all of the forums that I've been a part of were not viewable without an account, which was manually approved or required a small payment (to make bans have a chance to actually stick).
People in general have no idea and just want to get spun up on drama and manufactured outrage.
Same thing happened when people started scrapping Twitter 10-15 years ago.
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That’s good news. Internet archiving is an important endeavor because you never know when they‘ll pull the plug. Now it‘s a little more secured and probably far more useful than in Discord‘s hands alone.
Not for messages that are supposed to be private lol. Let me just make a copy of all texts you've sent over the last decade, for "archiving".
This says it was done via the API so they wouldn't be private messages.
Texts are sent in plain-text and I wouldn't recommend discussing anything you'd like to keep private via text.
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So this is:
'Uh guys, Discord chats leaked..."
For... what, just literally everyone who used Discord between 2015 and 2017, everyone who was an early adopter?
Dear fucking god.
I used to say 'someday, people will learn', but fucking no obviously not, no they won't, almost everyone is an idiot and/or truly doesn't care.
... I guess this'll be fodder for a whole bunch of dramatubers / pedohunters for the next year or so...
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"scraped" via API? I don't think It means what you think it means.
"anonymized" sure. I highly doubt they read every message. I'm sure there is lots of de-anonymizing information in the messages themselves
For example--
Anon1: "hey jeff, wanna play Minecraft?"
Anon2: "sure"
Thus we know Anon2's name is Jeff. I imagine there's a lot of this.
🚩
marked safe
from Brazilian mass discord message leak
(never used discord)
They just wanted to find new slurs.
Public data should be accessible anonymously. You can't change my mind.
Ooh! Do Teams next
Great news for open source AI.
This is just trolling, at this point.
Every time you post, you're posting so that Meta, Google, Reddit and every known retail store like Walmart, Target, Kroger, etc. can see it because they bought that info or harvested it themselves. I think these are great announcements so people can see who sees and manipulates you with your own contributions of data.
The feedback loop is everywhere in tech.
If they were on OPEN servers, I doubt they cared that much.
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