Hacker News Reader

> their code is proprietary, they're a business.

Their code can be proprietary, but their protocol shouldn't be. Walled gardens are antithetical to the spirit that built the internet, and no amount of donations can't change the fact that Discord is bad for the net.

I'm not surprised they don't want to "un-wall" their garden to satisfy a truely tiny amount of people. The "walled garden" is an argument that goes in circles, what if we all like our walled garden? Apple too, for example. If there were more competitors outside of the wall that would be a lot more beneficial, than trying to attack the wall because users are so happy they don't want to leave it.

> satisfy a truely tiny amount of people

If this were true: Why go after the people creating alternate clients, as Discord has apparently done a number of times now? Apparently "un-walling" is not a problem here, people not being walled quite as hard (without any involvement or development cost for discord themselves) is.

Devil's advocate:

Because things like unauthorized clients make abuse easier. If you control the client, you can do more than if you merely control the API.

It's because most people don't understand the societal consequences of it.

We are dependent on the whims of single companies like no other time in history.

> We are dependent on the whims of single companies like no other time in history.

If discord whom one might depend upon, on a whim shut down, there are about 50 alternatives. The consumer has the most power they have ever had in history, and the companies are all desperately hoping that they are not going into the wikipedia page next to myspace (at least until the c-suite cashes out).

Chat forums are so incredibly low stakes anyway, that the disappearence of a handfull would probably be a net contributer to the world anyway. Nothing of great value would be lost. So the societal consequences you speak of are meaningless.

I disagree that we are dependent on the whims of single companies more than anytime in history.

In fact, once you go 100 years or more back, I think most of history is dominated by major monopolies, trusts, and nation-sized companies in ways that we can't fathom. There is no East India Trading Company today. There is no U.S. Steel or Rockefeller Standard Oil. There is no Big 3 newsmedia companies controlling all news.

Just saying, a little historical perspective is useful.

What could those whims be? To go out of business?

They've sent out cease and desists to every project trying to create an alternative experience like TUI for those on lower resources or want to cut a lot of the 'crap' and tracking out of the app.

Their protocol has been reverse engineered. I've been making bots since the early days and it started from people reverse engineering the protocol. Discord has done a ton to support bot makers.

Almost every company is an aspiring "big, evil" company, and they can pull out the rug whenever they feel. Discord fits the mould of proto-bigevil-co exactly. What companies in their position reliably do is be as inviting as possible until they have solidified a dominant position, e.g. through network effects, then turn up the pain and the profits when it's safe.

The only question is whether they get big enough and safe enough to start abusing their position.

It's a complete kafkatrap. Everything is great, which is how you know they're evil.

Communities and their documentation need to be resilient to change. Discord is just the chat app du jour. There will be other seemingly preferred apps in the future that will annoy some people if you don't use them. When that happens, you cannot migrate your community and its content. It lives in, and belongs to, Discord's walled garden.

I generally agree with you here. However I think there's some nuance, are you suggesting discord add a way to export all the data of a server (copy my messages), so you can move it to another platform? It sounds like potential privacy issues/violations to me. I think it's not that simple. I don't disagree they should reasonably allow you to easily migrate.

But you can migrate. Have a bot running bridging both apps and then phase the old one slowly out. Like

https://github.com/reactiflux/discord-irc

https://t2bot.io/discord/

That way you are not stuck in an ecosystem. Sure some ppl will always be unhappy and looking up content in the old system is subpar but thats the nature of the game.

Discord could ban that bot whenever they feel like.

> Almost every developer I know loves having all their projects and developer communities on discord, and get annoyed when there's one using IRC that we want to interact with.

Consider that this is likely the result of bias in your social circles. While I have no doubts Discord is currently the most popular, the "almost all" part is the result of bias. For me, it's the opposite, again a result of bias.

Regarding practicality, I think Matrix (specifically via Element) is definitely practical today and improving extremely quickly. This holds even more due to the existence of bridges to other protocols, including Discord.

You are trying to dismiss FOSS using the word "ideological".

Describing using closed source IM as "practical" and FLOSS ones "overexaggerated" is in itself an example of ideology.

> its not like they're some big evil company

Unsure how you want to quantify this, and I'm curious what makes you say that. Are you affiliated with Discord in some way? I'm not trying to accuse you.

Even if it is true and Discord is some benevolent company when it comes to their long term intentions (which we can't know): The thing with companies is that their leadership is always subject to change.

It's not like we have any shortage of companies betraying the trust of their users, leaking data due to either user hostility or negligence, becoming shitty or "evil", or even turning their product into something entirely different.

Stallman was right.

I like Stallman. He's a man of principles, we need people like him to stand up and advocate for the things he does. But his ways are extreme and not something that's reasonable for many people.

I thought about the same when I listened to him live like 20 years ago, then SCO vs Linux happened, the Sony rootkit happened, mobile spyware disguised as apps happened, devices with built-in privacy violation code happened, etc. So, yes, he's an extremist and uncomfortable at times, but we badly need others like him in the tech field.

To point out problems and as a voice of warning: I absolutely agree.

But on the other hand: a lot of negative things happened because a lot of things happened. I doubt we'd have a similar amount of things happening if everyone only used the purest of pure software and "learn, configure, maintain and run seven services so you can use chat" was what everyone does.

Having zero wiggle room is terrible for making progress.

Stallman never advocated that everyone should learn, configure, maintain and run seven services so you can use chat.

If you like Stallman you've never worked with him. But he was right about this.

I find it interesting you label this "Stallman-esque" when time has shown Stallman was pretty dead on.

> what about alienating all the users who prefer discord and don't want to install whatever "free" alternative you suggest?

You don‘t need to install anything. There are web IRC clients, and you don‘t even need an account. It‘s actually easier to use and has a lower barrier of entry in that regard.

You don't need to install discord either. It works just fine on the web client, and this was (I assume) largely why it got so popular at first.

You have to create an account, agree to a shady ToS, and solve hCAPTCHA sudokus leaking data over to Cloudflare, and your session isn't saved when you restart your browser so you have to go through that whole annoying flow every time you want to use the web client.

Discord only requires you to input a name. Some servers have configured themselves to be more locked down because of spam.

>your session isn't saved when you restart your browser

This has never happened to me. Have you tried with a fresh instance of chrome / firefox with no extensions?

I have it in an isolated Firefox container for a single contract project with uBlock, uMatrix, and Privacy Possum, and blocking third-party cookies. If there's an issue with this setup, maybe there should be an issue as I won't be disabling these extensions.

Maybe umatrix is blocking needed cookies? It's easy to break apps with umatrix.

> "Needed"

If it's not first party, it's probably not needed--especially if it's with Cloudflare.

> Some servers have configured themselves to be more locked down because of spam.

every server I've clicked on has required logging into discord (and an account means also providing an email+DoB), is there really a majority of servers that only require entering a nick?

Most servers I run only require a nick. It's not unheard of in IRC land for channels to require you make an account.

I have never found anything about discord to be that compelling.

I think the piece overlooks the fact that most FOSS software these days is written by corporate America for corporate America. This became apparent back when Redhat was being sued by SCO for Unix copyright infringement. Turns out IBM had "donated" a bunch of code to Linux, including their journaling file system code that had once been part of AIX. It is a moot point to ask FOSS developers to use FOSS tools when most FOSS code these days is donated by corporate America.