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Comment by elevation | Hacker News Reader

I didn't feel comfortable giving discord my phone number when they demanded it, so I lost access to the open source communities that insist on collaborating there.

I wish breaches like this would cause people to reconsider their choices but sadly, it's unlikely most users will move.

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I also wish open-source communities would move off of Discord for another reason: Users are limited to joining a maximum of 100 servers.

I've hit the cap and it's driving me crazy. It's really easy to hit it since each friend group, hobby group, gaming community, and open-source community often all have their own servers.

I can barely keep up with 6 semi active discord servers, each with tens of semi active channels... Much less think about doing it with hundreds. More power to you, must have figured out a good notification scheme

I am super curious how other people use discord. I’m like you—trying and basically failing to keep up with 6 servers. I just want to watch a power user out of morbid curiosity. I suspect they are also browser tab hoarders, which I’m also curious about.

I don't really care about the notifications. I just want to read what's in the servers. Lots of communities post their announcements/links/resources in their Discord servers.

It is sometimes possible to view a Discord server without joining it, but it is painful compared to just joining the server.

That limit is per account, right?

The issue is if you don't enforce the phone number requirement on your server you get all the trolls who don't use phone numbered accounts. I wish Discord would allow you to restrict known VPNs instead of requiring phone numbers. It would solve so many issues. I know a LOT of VPNs wont be caught, but if you block MOST non-residential IP blocks, you'll capture a lot of them.

The communities I'm in don't require a phone number and very rarely gets trolls. Proper moderation is the most important part. Occasionally there's a spambot, but they're just hacked accounts from pre-existing real users, and as someone that uses a VPN with Discord, I'd prefer to not be treated as an evil-doer please.

Sure, are the communities you're in tens of thousands of users or more? Because things change really quickly depending on how many users are active, if it's a community server, and the subject matter. Even a programming Discord is a hell hole. You cannot have enough mods ever. Things fall through the cracks and people get hurt. You can't moderate DMs or know the wellbeing of tens of thousands of your users who are being harassed in DMs and have no idea how to get help. Discords full of a lot of youth.

Theres users who rotate community servers on a VPN / new spun up alts. They are relentless. I noticed the communities that are massive and do not have this problem to this extend all require phone number.

Phone numbers may be required to bring order to a vast international user base, but a few dozen devs and a small user community can function without invasive moderation tactics.

Trolls likely have access to phone number farms though. And in some parts of the world it's extra cheap to mass-register phone numbers. Trolls wouldn't be harmed in a data leak, only normal users get hurt.

Most trolls aren't the kind of trolls that run large scale networks, they're the 12 year olds you triggered by saying BLM

Once a phone is banned though, it's unusable again at least in a given server. Discord will treat it like an IP ban (which they also do).

Discord doesn’t require a phone number. It’s individual community owners who opt to require it. You can create a server that doesn’t require one but it effectively means you can’t ban people since they can just sign up again on a new account.

Discord has an account flag that triggers a mandatory phone number verification. It happens if you do things like send messages too quickly over the span of about a minute, or send multiple friend requests, or join too many servers, or start too many DMs, or indeed, join any server that is set to require phone number verification.

I am in dozens of servers and have not encountered this demand for a phone number. I have been in servers that required it for moderators as part of 2FA, and I just declined to moderate there. It had no effect on my use of any other server.

Just because something hasn't happened to you, doesn't mean it doesn't happen to other people

It never happened to him, so it's never happened

Makes this huge data leak a real head scratcher

Anyone on HN should know the fickle nature of fraud detection, especially when the cost of getting it wrong is 0.

It has happened to me on two accounts. OP is also not the only other person I've seen who has dealt with it.

Bully for you that you haven't encountered it, but it's certainly a thing.

I refuse to use their “create a server” language. It is not a server by any definition of the word server.

You can set up a community on their servers.

I’m not sure why they chose to use misleading language, but it is misleading.

I'm not sure it matters in this situation ...? Server/instance/VM/shard/... when used in this context is pure corporate naming BS. They'd have called it "setting up a new circle jerk" if they thought it would increase metrics

It’s wrong in terms of the technical implementation and right in terms of user experience.

Gamers are well familiar with different communities actually hosting servers and instances for games or voice chat pre discord. Discord offers the same experience but without physically being different servers. Keeping the name guides users in the same way OSs call it a recycling bin despite not actually being a bin.

Fun fact: Discord called them guilds before realising that they could compete with paid services that set up actual (e.g. Mumble) servers for you by pretending this is equivalent and free

I also have trouble going along with the doublespeak. If a supermarket called their beer apple juice, I'd also not be offering my friends "apple juice", I'd call it what it is

Guild is innocuous enough and since the API docs still call their communities that, that can be a term to use among those in the know to have common and clear terminology

'Guilds in Discord represent an isolated collection of users and channels, and are often referred to as "servers" in the UI.' —https://discord.com/developers/docs/resources/guild

This seems like a distinction without a difference. If you used a paid service offering Mumble servers that used some custom software that allowed them to offer multiple ... "servers" on different ports/IP addresses from a single daemon, would you really care?

Focusing on the fact that it's not really a "server" because they aren't running as separate processes seems like utterly silly pedantry, and we probably don't even know if that's actually true regarding Discord or not.

The distinction matters. The cost (to my users) of switching from one Mumble server to another is the same, regardless of who hosts the server. The cost of switching from one "Discord server" to another is much lower than the cost of switching between Discord and any Discord clone, keeping people on Discord.

That's not some inherent feature of it being a server or not, that's a feature of Discord offering much more features than Mumble.

No, it's a feature of Discord putting all the "Discord servers" into one program, but not allowing third-party servers to be listed in the same program. A rival system offering exactly the same featureset as Discord is nonetheless not interoperable with Discord, whereas a Mumble rival could easily be interoperable with Mumble clients.

A server, to me, you have control over if that's the product name of what you rent. Discord servers are as much yours as Hacker News is yours

It's like pretending a taxi is the same as owning a vehicle, even if the taxi company was your neighbor and there's always someone available. The result is the same but the distinction couldn't be clearer. To me it's similarly misrepresentative to say you own a car when you live next to a big taxi station, as to say the SaaS web front-end you get on Discord is a rented server

That definition sounds a lot like it would exclude services renting Mumble servers. It's difficult to reconcile this with your previous comment.

I tried making an account once, technically my account was created but trying to log in only gets me a screen that requires I verify a phone number. I was never even able to attempt to join a server. I assume it's my browser's privacy settings and ad blocker but I'm not sure.

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