Discord is down
discordstatus.com
discordstatus.com
I've always had the impression that - although obviously there is pressure within the company to monetize - they seem to have a lot of developer focus on 'just doing the obvious things that clients want'. Almost every major complaint or feature request I can think of from the last decade or so of using Discord has been addressed in some way, which is really cool to see from software... even if they do somewhat irritating things sometimes.
Still, considering their only initial draw was insane ease of sign-up, they’ve really catapulted the program into something genuinely decent. It’s definitely the best “””free software””” improvements I’ve seen.
A feature request I've seen from many people over years, which Discord haven't implemented, is the option to make public channels readable and searchable on the web, or make the data easily exportable for projects to put it on the web themselves.
These days many open source projects and companies use Discord as their meeting place for public discussion, development discussion, support queries etc, instead of the web forums and mailing lists they used to use. The inability to find the content of those discussions from search engines is a major pain point, though not enough to switch to something else because Discord is so good in other respects.
Can you mute every single channel in a server at once? So that you can then unmute one or two? To avoid notifications dot not just pings.
It's a workflow I've used for almost every single server I join, but you have to manually mute each channel. I've seen it requested since 2015 and still no way to do it. Maybe using their api? I'll have to check on that.
What you can do is mute channel categories and then collapse them, which I do for some servers.
I used to keep up on the thread tracking this issue. They don't care enough to fix it.
In fairness, if I was running a service like this, guilds or whatever would map to actual servers striped across multiple failure domains (albeit not 1:1).
And this design, despite technical SPOF risks, provides a massively better UI/UX than Slack for communities. Honestly discord is the best thing since IRC for non critical communication.
However, such a severe system of domination has, at its core, just one single problem, the problem which we are seeing today: a mass outage, like this, must, by its nature, affect every user of the service. Mastadon, to note, does not have this problem--but even Mastadon, like Discord, relies on the electric grid and the system of production from which such a service is produced, which at all levels seeks to continuously generate and regenerate itself in all its social functions.
My experience has been nothing been 100% positive.
Not to be overly critical, but its the very use of the word "hang out" that really highlights what I was discussing. The spaces are designed to be totalizing, in the "real world" you could hang out at a friends house or the park or something, the latter is free and open, and you can come and go as you please. Discord servers, by their very design, are antithetical to that ethos. Like a bad parody of 19th century secret societies, first you must be admitted; then, once in, you are subjected to an immediate system of hierarchy, and potentially higher "inner circle" social spaces. The total control and hierarchization of social life, with widespread tools for monitoring and expulsion, where everything you do or say can be recorded and tracked, is part and parcel of the architecture of Discord. This isn't a private server you or your friends own, its a space designed to extract profit for a mass corporation by keeping you on it as long as possible and subtily encouraging microtransactions with via social pressure: Reddit has the same model. And the longer you stay on Discord, the more of your social life is exclusively on Discord, and the more opportunities arise for Discord to exploit you for profit.
It is highly insidious, it is no different in form or structure from any other social media website: even HN suffers in this regard, since it has small incentives to keep you returning and commenting and replying, and passively exposes you to advertisements for various services offered by YC startups. At least here there is something more than just that, but only 4chan achieves an absolutely democratizing end as a place of almost pure excess. But the latter isn't very good for actual discussions, so I come here.
now nothing loads anymore, at all :D
how long till they fix it?