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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Discord works by keeping a serverside database of which people are talking to which people, which is, to a serious adversary, the most valuable single piece of information the service can cough up. Discord is much, much more convenient than Signal, and that's good. The services have different goals.

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How is Discord more convenient? I don't mean the question critically, but I wonder what a sophisticated user sees in Discord when Signal seems, to me, as convenient as texting and calling.

Discord has your full chat history in a conveniently searchable server side database. When new people join a channel in your discord server, they call see the full chat history so they can get fully caught up.

You can use discord on multiple devices at the same time without the devices needing to directly sync with each other (because the state is stored on the server).

>When new people join a channel in your discord server, they call see the full chat history so they can get fully caught up.

FYI there is a permission to disable this for a channel

The point is that's a feature that is possible because the chat history is stored on discord's servers.

One big thing Signal is bad at for me is using from a computer.

They have a desktop client, but it's just a weird thing that proxies through my phone in a sort of bizarre backwards self-hosting sort of way.

It does not proxy through your phone. After the initial setup, you can switch off your phone and the desktop client will work just fine.

Except (unless something has changed very recently) you can't backup/restore your chat history to a new desktop client... Security over general usability.

You can back up. Not restore though. The database key is in the config file.

How does it help security?

Excellent point; agreed.

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