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Comment by stryan | Hacker News Reader

>Now Thunderbird has added chat, that's great. What does it support, Slack? no. Discord? no. Oh. That's not great, then, that's useless. They're intending to jumpstart a chat protocol with a client that's used by like 0.8% of users? Sure.

Thunderbird has had XMPP and other chat for many, many years now.

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Like I said, 0.8% of users. Slack and discord and maybe the MS product are what matter in the chat space. If you're not offering that then the dev resources would probably be better funnelled into bug chasing and UI consistency.

'It supports XMPP' that's great. ICQ support would arguably be more useful.

I don’t know about Slack, but discord’s terms of service explicitly forbid external chat clients. It’s also proprietary, like Slack I believe. Maybe we should try and encourage more use of open protocols over things like Discord or Slack.

This. For the parent, please don’t hold Thunderbird accountable for services like Discord being hostile towards users.

Discord works in Franz.

I don't like it and barely use it, but a couple of times a year I need to monitor certain groups, so I have a Franz tab which frames the webapp.

you realize discord bans people who use third party clients, right?

One should note that doesn't really happen with Ripcord [0] though.

[0] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

> doesn't really happen

Does that mean 0 cases (timeframe?) and official confirmation from the discord team that ripcord is allowed?

If not it can and will happen (as before). Why would it be inherently different with ripcord?

This mostly gets answered by user keb_ (see below) but I will add that Ripcord and Discord have "tussled" before: exchanged emails, etc.

Last I heard Discord maintains the TOS are getting violated, but apparently the popularity of Ripcord keeps the conflict mostly at bay.

I've seen multiple people be banned from using this client. It does everything in its power to remain unnoticed but you only need to come across the wrong server-side detection update once to get the hammer.

Good to know and unfortunate although not terribly surprising. I guess this is the recommended user experience that the commenter up the thread is suggesting be integrated into thunderbird?

There were some automated bans that happened after an outage (years ago), but those bans got lifted. After that, I haven't seen anyone get banned for using Ripcord. But like all things, YMMV. The benefits of Ripcord outweigh the negatives for me.

> It does everything in its power to remain unnoticed

It reports its user agent as "Ripcord"

Only bans I've heard of using Ripcord has been when people join servers on that client. Don't know how prevalent it is tho.

Yeesh. I mean kind of makes sense but it doesn't make want to use them more...

Headless chrome isn't a third party client.

Yes. It is. It's been confirmed multiple times that even using browser plugins that interact with the Discord client code in any way counts, in their opinion, as a "third party client".

That's the last thing I want in my Mozilla made email client.

I'm pretty happy with added Matrix support though, may make me take a look at Thunderbird again in addition to aerc.

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