discordo: Lightweight, secure, and feature-rich Discord terminal client
github.com
github.com
It's a policy change, not a product change, and demanding a company adjust their bad policy is totally normal.
Make it opt-in with advanced user verification if you want to fight spam, not simply blanket ban everyone whose data you can't monetize easily :shrug:
A lot of this stuff is UI-related; it's things that aren't a reskin, but they're a major shakeup of how the entire UI works, and would break all other clients using a framework.
The problem with "truly" federated protocols is that every design fuckup is preserved in amber for eternity.
And who is the one to name them a utility? Is it the government of the company's base of operations? If so won't they just move (such as many companies do to avoid tax complications)?
And where do you draw the line? Why is Discord a utility and not, say, Truth Social?
And then how do you turn federated networks like Mastodon into utilities?
Once something is classified as a utlity, what are the rules for guarding customer data? Are they more beholden to governments to release customer data? Less?
Well, we should certainly make an effort so that regulations are predictable and sensible.
> And where do you draw the line? Why is Discord a utility and not, say, Truth Social?
> And then how do you turn federated networks like Mastodon into utilities?
I think this is going about it from the wrong side. Snail mail, phone service, internet service - these are things we regulate in various ways. Maybe we should with various, similar digital services too. Email? Messaging networks like discord?
A website is a publicly facing API and if two different browsers can talk the HTTP protocol and implement all the other APIs the website requires then you shouldn't be blocked from accessing the website through one of them
The rule right now is "Any jerkoff can dictate what is and isn't allowed to run on my computer" and I would like to change that rule to "I'm in charge of what runs on my computer, you're in charge of what runs on your computer".
There's no jerk dictating what is allowed to run on your computer, there's someone offering a piece of software that you can willingly install on your computer if you want.
If you don't want that, you're always free to not use the software or use workarounds to avoid the things you don't like.
I, for example, hate ads and use adblock always. But I don't think it's fair for me to go and say that everyone should forced to not put ads on their stuff.
I'm not a fan but I understand that I have no right to dictate what people do with their software
With each of these products we keep giving up more and more of the powerful variety that was available before. While the average person doesn't lose much, the average person doesn't really exist and we've really lost a lot of long tails of value.
Is there a moral principle preventing a power company from providing you with all your electrical appliances and forbidding you from using those not provided by them?
FOMO on "community" is a considerable factor. The regular person is quite likely a social being. They will care and value being able to use the same platform.
It is a personal sacrifice to resist it while it remains. Even when a Free Software alternative becomes wide-reaching enough for an exodus, it'll be years too late.
> But I don't think it's fair for me to go and say that everyone should forced to not put ads on their stuff.
You can use ad blocking software because browsers are on our side. Our browsers support uBlock Origin whether webmasters like it or not and they don't have the power to force us to switch.
What companies like Discord and WhatsApp do is akin to contractually requiring us to use a specific browser that does their bidding on pain of banishment from the platform. That's how they get away with advertising, spamming, surveillance, DRM and countless other abuses: by forcing us to run their software on our computers if we want to use their service. If we could run our own clients, they would be powerless.
The thing actually stopping you from using Discord with a third-party client is that Discord’s server software responds differently to the way the third-party clients talk to it.
You’re in charge of what runs on your computer, and they're in charge of what runs on theirs.
The likelihood they sell/yield personal user data/metadata is too high to ignore.
Who is forcing you to install Discord?
Don't like the Discord client or have trouble using it? Pay the price of not participating in dozens of communities you would like to participate in.
Maybe sometimes I could pick up on a meme without knowing the source material and sort of fit in for a bit. That's what not participating directly can be like, when you're caught at the fringe of your community because you don't use <platform>.
In fact, the problem is chiefly that a certain group of assholes never upgrade their clients, ever, and disingenuously try to keep everyone on an old version of the protocol, because they don't see a need for new features. Period. I've been through this gauntlet with some long-running open-source projects, and basically these guys were like "plain text and command-line should be sufficient for everyone (and shame on you if it's not!)".
Of course, that's fine if you're a programmer, but then these guys were SHOCKED - shocked, I say, that people's whose primary working medium was images rather than text - you know, UI designers and artists - found it a struggle to work on their project and quickly gave up.
This kind of bigotry constantly stifles progress in the OSS community.
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There's a damn good reason no federated service even comes remotely close to Discord, and it's because despite all of those features being developed for other clients, repeatedly, there is always heavy social pressure not to leave people out, so "newfangled" features get swatted down by communities, and people are forced to only use the features that everyone supports.
You can have IRC that supports pasting images just fine, but some asshole's client doesn't support it, so you're back to using a shithole solution like external pastebins or personal FTP servers, again. Otherwise you're dealing with a constant "I don't see anything! Why can't you just use something that works on my client!"
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So no, "interoperability and open systems" doesn't mean all users can be happy. It's a trojan horse to let luddites force obsolete versions of the protocol on everyone because they don't want to update.
People chose discord over them.
It's the only way to ensure we have the ability to adversarially interoperate with the offered service.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
Because consumers should be able to make demands in return for adoption?
In a world less completely asymmetrically imbalanced toward capital, consumers would have a say in the products offered them, not merely the option to purchase (or not) rights to use technology as-is.
Yes, exactly! Monopolies are bad and shouldn't exist, so companies that only exist to create them shouldn't exist either. Without Discord and other providers wishing to make a chat monopoly for themselves, development would be driven by need. That tends to create solutions that are much more open and less exploitative of its users.
Computing freedom: it should be law. Clauses like "you can't reverse engineer" and "you can only connect via our software" should be null and void.
> What else should I be able to demand from other people's products
You should be able to demand that your computing freedom be respected. We should all be able to run whatever software we want to interact with their servers.
Definition of gatekeepers in DMA:
> A size that impacts the internal market: ... equal to or above €7.5 billion in in each of the last three financial years, ... The control of an important gateway for business users towards final consumers: ... more than 45 million monthly active end users ... and more than 10,000 yearly active business users ...
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/QANDA_...
Discord's performance:
> Discord generated $130 million revenue in 2020, ... Discord has over 140 million active monthly users...
Without a definition - which I have not located - this is ambiguous - does anybody know what they use here to determine if a user is a "business user" or not?
If the definition is "account represents and is owned by a business rather than an physical person and is used in the course of business" I'm pretty sure Discord would come out above that?
2. I see this all the time on HN, but it's never substantiated. Besides being laggy on older devices, which can be said for at least half of all modern software, what specifically makes it anything but an excellent communication platform?
Pick one. Put the other in the fire.
Creating a client does not protect the absurd amount of personal user data and metadata it already has, and will continue to acquire. Does not protect new users from having their personal information stolen, processed and sold/yielded by Discord. Further creating conditions for more people to be coerced into using it "because others are too" is not quite neat, let's put it like that.
Automated user accounts or "self-bots" are against Discord's Terms of Service. I am not responsible for any loss caused by using "self-bots" or Discordo.
>All 3rd party apps or client modifiers are against our ToS, and the use of them can result in your account being disabled. I don't recommend using them.
https://twitter.com/discord/status/1229357198918197248
Thus it looks like in practice you can't have a client that has local chat history, local search, or just better information density on the screen, and simultaneously hope to not have your account nuked.
You may not copy, modify, create derivative works based upon, distribute, sell, lease, or sublicense any of our software or services. You also may not reverse engineer or decompile our software or services, attempt to do so, or assist anyone in doing so, unless you have our written consent or applicable law permits it.
In the other words, they want to disallow derivative works as long as law permits. There are two possible workarounds:
1. If your software doesn't actually depend on Discord clients and servers at all, for example AutoHotKey macros, you would be probably fine as they wouldn't be derivative works. Legal 3rd-party clients may be created with this way (I haven't seen any such attempts though); create a virtual desktop where the official client runs and reconstruct an alternative interface from screen captures, in principle.
2. They can only do things allowed by the law. Reverse engineering in particular is allowed in many jurisdictions when it's necessary to operate with other programs or devices, and a virtual desktop mentioned in 1 may qualify for this (but: IANAL). If a broader allowance is desired though, the law has to be changed.
>We reserve the right to block, remove, and/or permanently delete your content for any reason, including breach of these terms, our Community Guidelines, our other policies, or any applicable law or regulation.
Subject to applicable law, we reserve the right to suspend or terminate your account and/or your access to some or all of our services with or without notice, at our discretion, including if:
- You breach these terms, our policies, or additional terms that apply to specific products.
- We’re required to do so to comply with a legal requirement or court order.
- We reasonably believe termination is necessary to prevent harm to you, us, other users, or third parties.
- Your account has been inactive for more than two years.
Given the current ToS using a third-party client already qualifies as an explicit reason for the account suspension and it doesn't seem to be wise to risk that. Yes, they still reserve the right to suspend your account for other unstated reasons, but that's another matter.
We currently don't intentionally block or disable third party clients or action the accounts of people who use them.
We do monitor the traffic of spammers and we build heuristics around how to identify them -- and sometimes third party clients get caught up in that. Cold comfort, I know, but it's not us trying to block/come after well-behaved third party clients.
Anyway, to OP, good luck with discordo! For one of our internal hack weeks a few years ago I tried to build an RFC1459 compliant Discord gateway... it was a fun POC, but definitely lots of rough edges because the paradigms don't exactly match up. :)
At a business level, can you share why the ToS forbids third party clients at all? We all know that "trusting the client" is not a viable security plan, so why does it matter what client people use?
Because if something breaks for a user and they complain, the company cannot diagnose it or fix it. Simply dealing with the complaints would be an extra cost on the company.
And when they decide to change part of the API, you have an unknown number of users that would be broken.
But the engineers who would be in charge of enforcing those rules do not spend time explicitly seeking out third party clients or modifications. They instead look for "non-standard behavior", which may incidentally catch either.
PS: This is why you don't speak about your employer's business unless asked to by your employer.
I just wish I could customize discord's GUI so:
-The GUI have so less empty space
-Have a "compact" version where it just shows the users in the channel and who's speaking, and compact view of a chat channel.
The default window is just an absolute PAIN, it doesn't go smaller than a certain size and it just has so much irrelevant information not pertinent to the voice/video call I'm in or who I'm chatting with.
Maybe I'm the boomer longing for individual/group chats a la MSN messenger 20 years ago. :O
Since this is relevant to the other discussion going on here: To my knowledge, Microsoft has never banned accounts for using third-party MSN clients; and there were definitely plenty of them back then. I even wrote my own and used it right up until they shut down the servers. MS had updated the protocol many times, but MS being the "good old MS", highly valued backwards compatibility and up to the day they shut down the servers, they still negotiated and worked with one of the very first protocol versions.
I know, right? The thing is, the vast majority of the generation using this don't have these qualms, it works for them. This must be how it felt like when we stopped used corded phones, haha. Or hand written stuff to type writers..
I have been locked out of my account, though. There was a week during which I got locked out, and had to re-authenticate with 2FA to get into my account, once a day. However, they eventually stopped doing that after enough support tickets rolled in, and Ripcord has been rippin' along ever since.
> golang
yet another terminal discord client that will be abandoned shortly
EDIT: wow, people really hate jokes. No fun allowed!