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Comment by hofrogs | Hacker News Reader

This is really cool and actually useful for peeking behind those annoying login walls. What software do you use to store/index/search in so much data? How did you get the data in the first place? Discord isn't exactly known for letting its data be available easily. Have the administrators of the guilds asked you for this? Have you contacted them and made them aware after the fact?

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Hey,

Thanks for your feedback.

For software, I use ScyllaDB and Elasticsearch. It's split across 6 physical nodes (8 including the CDN). Data collection is handled using standard user accounts, accessing only public, discoverable servers. I plan to write a blog post about the technical aspect of how this was done soon.

Admins of these servers weren't contacted, as the content indexed is already publicly accessible, comparable to a forum like this or public subreddit. That said, I understand the sensitivity around data visibility, and I've made it very simple for any user to opt out of indexing at any time. Private or invite-only servers are, of course, completely excluded.

That's a lot of compute, how much does it cost to keep it running? I don't see how that project would generate any income on its own

I already own the hardware, so I only pay for colocation and transit. It's probably a lot less than you think. I hope to find some way to monetize it, but it is cheap enough that I can keep it running for quite a long time without any income.

Thanks for this. Well good luck with keeping it up, it's a really useful service.

Wow, that must be quite expensive! You said the files alone are a few PB. So at least 2PB / 8 servers ~= 250TB per server, which would probably put each server at > 20k $ (unless you’re putting it together with duct tape and scraps, but even then the disks will cost a ton).

Hey,

Not exactly. Attachments are only fetched from Discord as the user requests them. This means that the vast majority of attachments are never stored on my server. Right now, I only have about 280TB of attachments locally on my own infrastructure. You can see more stats here: https://searchcord.io/about

Thanks for your question!

I suggest you to remove the opt-out functionality and let it scrape private servers that it discovers via publicly posted invite links. You don't owe anyone posting on a public forum any privacy. Moreover, the most valuable data to search for is probably somewhat obscured.

Hey,

Thanks for your suggestions. However, this does not work for a few reasons:

1. Joining servers is protected by increasingly difficult to solve captchas that have no commercially available solver. This is not a battle I want to fight.

2. There are a LOT of CSAM rings that spam invite links in public servers. This is also not something I want to go anywhere near.

Moreover, after the fallout of spy.pet, I think it is very important that users are able to opt out.

It is arguably more important that the world doesn't lose as much information as Discord now contains, or leave it gated behind logins and captchas and whatever other nonsense each server implements.

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