Discord Is Having an Outage
status.discordapp.com
status.discordapp.com
It's just vocabulary but for somebody like me who still hangs onto IRC even though it's been almost entirely displaced by proprietary and centralized solutions like Discord it really feels like they're rubbing it in. Just co-opting decentralized lingo with none of the actual features.
Jokes aside, I don't think there's anything about the term "server" that implies independence. I can think of many centralized access points that are called "servers" but aren't independent. Hell, even racks aren't necessarily independent.
I get what you're saying, but the term "server" can be pretty vaguely applied.
Communication is perception.
Simian above, and myself grew up in an era where a server did indeed imply independence. Counterstrike servers, IRC servers, FTP servers, all independent things in these contexts.
For others the perception may be different as I assume it is with anyone young who primarily encounters the word server in their Discord use.
Exactly - something difficult to do that not everyone could just do (or rent from a service, or have permanently running). Which is cool.
I'm saying this is an important element to Discord's early success precisely because it understood the gamer audience it was engaging, how it communicated and thought and the tools they were using. Discord allowed people who previously couldn't to "have a server". Which lead to a period of everyone "making" one, and then better ones survived. Not the only factor, but it contributed. I clearly remember how proud people were of their "servers".
I'm sure they knowingly made use of this fact and picked a term that implied more than it does in technical reality because it had social currency. If you play to an audience, understanding what it values and what generates status within it helps a lot.
Back when I _did_ play CS, servers didn't rely on any online component. Many gaming places had their own local servers, and continued to run just fine when the internet was down.
The comments this elicited below harkened back to some great memories of spinning up Half Life and then Counterstrike servers in the pre-Steam days.
Then even more memories from the Steam/Ventrillo/CS days.
Good memories in bad times. Thanks for that and best of luck with midgame!
Yes a "server" especially if you call it "my server" implies some sort of independence.
WoW, Runescape, CS 1.6/Source, Slack, uh... Tribes? I guess?
With the rest I haven't heared people saying "my server" in a sense that they own the thing.
Back in the bad old days if you wanted to voice chat you had to know someone who could invite you to join a "server" (or set one up yourself), and I think the verbiage just kind of stuck.
The internal term of "guild" is more accurate, but no users actually call them that.
Not to disagree, but I don't really see how the old rotary handles suggested the term "roll down the window" either. What was rolling? If I were supposed to describe the old way without knowing an existing word for it, I'd say "crank" was the closest option.
http://erlang.org/documentation/doc-4.9.1/doc/design_princip...
This is like calling unix processes that listen on ports "servers", which is pretty common.
I wish at some point we'd see mainstream messengers that put actual effort into respecting the user, along with their autonomy and privacy. It'd be amazing if we could actually directly (from a technical perspective) message other people, without needing central servers between us.
Also open source?, I doubt it.
As for secure, well that's a whole other matter.
Yes, open source.
The probability that somebody replies with a quote of the entire unencrypted thread when attempting to use PGP approaches 1 for long email chains. Encrypted email also leaks not just metadata but data since you can't encrypt subject headers.
Although it is a privacy based, (good for _some_ people) I don't see why the masses would use this if WhatsApp is there.
It has a respectable 10,000,000+ installs on the google play store and ranks high on the apple store with 270,000+ reviews. Though not comparable with the likes of WhatsApp (which I personally use and prefer), I would not dismiss it as 'not' a mainstream option. We can agree to disagree for sure.
Some of the tech is in WhatsApp, but it's misleading to imply that this means WhatsApp is a good replacement for Signal if you care about privacy.
One of WhatsApp's two co-founders left WhatsApp when he saw what Facebook was doing and has since been pumping a lot of money into Signal.
There is no reason this should not be possible, I'm hoping that tools like Dat or IPFS will enable stuff like this to be better than the alternatives
This is not a rhetorical question. If I knew a way to make a more user-friendly service profitable enough to have a reasonable shot of gigadollar return on investment (which is what it takes to be interesting to venture capitalists), I might very well go ahead and put together a YC application, but right now, I don't know a way to do that. Do you?
Me too. The keywords you might be looking for are encryption and traffic analysis counter-measures. In my eyes it's largely a political problem.
I have two accounts, none needed my phone number. Just e-mail. Is this new?
Either way, you're effectively de-anonymized.
They suspended my account for linking three people I know personally to my own website. In DM. Not twenty, not some spam site, not strangers. They nuked my whole account with no recourse.
The ToS, of course, says you can't sue them, either in a class action or outside of one. Their ToS also bans political cartoons that "mock" anyone, again, even in DMs.
It's not possible to use Discord without agreeing to these terms.
If so, that would be a massive story that would get thousand of upvotes in the subreddit very quickly. That makes me think there might be something more to this.
https://sneak.berlin/20200220/discord-is-not-an-acceptable-c...
My account was less than a day old, and both the initial registration, as well as the connection at the time of suspension were via Tor, which may account for the fact that it was incorrectly identified as spam.
Censorship is censorship, though; connecting via a privacy network should not suddenly mean you can't link your friends to your own website without getting summarily deleted.
It's not really a massive story; people simply don't give a shit that Discord is a surveillance/censorship platform.
I think amongst younger people there is a general sense of "they can read all of it on every platform, who cares anymore" fatalism, and anyone who refuses to participate on that basis or complains about it is seen as an inconvenient whiner who should just click AGREE on the ToS without reading it like everyone else did, and leak their physical location/residential address to Discord via their home IP or phone number, like everyone else did.
Unfortunately, I (and others like me) do not have that luxury. For physical safety reasons, if I cannot participate without leaking my location, I cannot participate at all.
How could you do this while also preserving network privacy between users? One of the big selling points of Discord is users can't see each other's IP addresses when they message or call each other. I believe you would need at least a simple relay in the middle to prevent that. Or layer it on some Tor-like anonymizing network, but I think that wouldn't be practical for this use case (especially video calls).
This is especially important for not just the typical privacy reasons: Discord is marketed heavily towards gamers, and some gaming communities are filled with script kiddies who rent "booter" (DDoS-for-hire) services to knock opponents online, to torment them and/or to gain an upper hand in games where disconnection means automatic forfeiture. This was one reason a lot of people switched from Skype to Discord, because Skype had many ways of seeing other users' IP addresses.
None of these were prepared for the massive surge of users working from home.
Not that I care, I've got books.
We self-host just about everything else ourselves, but for some reason everyone flocked to Discord.
In seriousness, I suspect if your company wasn’t already using a chat solution then perhaps they weren’t interested in that.
The most of USA is going in to two week lock down if you look at schools, restaurants, a lot of white collar jobs, etc.
What do you think everyone is going to do all day? Every kid in the country is about to use the internet at the same time.
I think we're going to see a lot of outages over the next two weeks.
An extremely niche and obscure (single player) game I follow for example has four discord servers-about one for every three active posters in the community!)
It has the same draw that the php bbs pages had in the 90's and 00's.
But our Microsoft Teams meeting in the morning worked pretty well. Even that everyone was calling from home. (That is 10 connections while usually is just one meeting room and a couple of people from home or another location).
Google Photos search was also stuck for several seconds before getting results.
In general the web felt slow most of the day. I am not surprised that Discord service is suffering.
In the mean time, my IRC-servers had 100% uptime. Just saying’.
According to Wikipedia [0] Freenode has less than 100k users spread across 32 servers. The group of Discord channels (confusingly referred to as a server) for Roblox players has 300k [1]. The Chill Zone server, which doesn't have a topic and where people just chat, has 150k members and over 6 million messages in it's "#general" channel, and the discord server for the /r/teenagers subreddit has 21M in its "#general" channel. These constitute a tiny fraction of the number of text messages being sent over discord, which itself probably uses a tiny amount of bandwidth compared to the constant pictures and files being sent, not to mention the voice and video calls.
It's easy to have 100% uptime when you have a product so user-hostile that nobody uses it. Yes, Discord is an electron app that probably spies on you, but users don't really care about that compared to being able to read messages sent when their computer was turned off or getting notifications on their phone, etc.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode [1]: https://top.gg/servers/150074202727251969
> but users don't really care about that compared to being able to read messages sent when their computer was turned off or getting notifications on their phone, etc.
I bet the also don't care about that compared to being able to actually send messages.
You are apparently arguing something incredibly different than me. You seem to be arguing that bad UX leads to low load, which makes 100% uptime hard. I'm arguing that it's the centralization that makes it hard. You aren't addressing that.
If Discord were decentralized, not all servers would have gone down today. Maybe not any. Maybe.
But also, there are a lot of alternatives that have better UX. Zulip and Matrix come to mind.
A series of fatal errors caused the majority of servers to become unavailable. We are working to revive all of these resources. Most users will be unable to connect while this work is ongoing.
"A series of fatal errors caused the majority of servers to become unavailable. We are working to revive all of these resources. Most users will be unable to connect while this work is ongoing."
And we have zero informations on what the problem is.
Akka, Microservices, half of Kubernetes... all are making similar observations and coming to different conclusions and/or battle plans based on the tools near at hand.
But it's not like monoliths don't have huge, even bigger problems with action-at-a-distance.
The problems that get you are a mix of simple human errors and subtle patterns of side effects that are difficult to spot or predict. Simple errors are easy to fix wherever. Emergent behavior is much harder to cope with.
I haven’t found multiple service architecture to have this issue in a careful, sufficiently large engineering org unless they share vulnerable infrastructure. There should not be any situation where multiple APIs are changing in a backwards-incompatible way simultaneously.