Discord Incident – Resolved
discordstatus.com
discordstatus.com
It seems to me these day people are OK with AWS going down and just blaming it on AWS rather than on themselves for not being prepared for big outages.
"Oh, nothing we can do because AWS/Cloudflare is down"
What does transparent mean here? AWS is super clear what resources are zonal and provides tons of guidance around making things multi-AZ. AZ outages aren't exactly frequent but they're reasonably likely.
Being susceptible to AZ (or region) outages is very much an architectural decision. Or a bug that needs to be fixed (I'm sure Coinbase didn't YOLO single-AZ, they've undoubtedly learned about some edge case that needs to be fixed). Sure it may not be worth the cost/complexity for some systems but resiliency is like job one for anything in the cloud that costs money when it's down.
Transparent as a system/box can be, meaning that you can't see / know about it. (Yeah, I guess you can read that not transparent as obscure in disclosure of how their system works, but it shouldn't make much sense)
> AWS is super clear what resources are zonal and provides tons of guidance around making things multi-AZ.
Yeah, they allow people cheaping out for zonal resources and then going down with their zone.
IRC is distributed and federated. Not only are there countless networks, each network has countless servers, and each group of servers that are up and can see each other can operate on their own, all the way down to a single server, or up to any subset up to all.
When a peering connection goes down and the network splits, maybe some people in the group disappear, or maybe from your point of view everyone else disappears.
Maybe the remaining subset of other users is already good enough because it's enough to continue what you were tallking about and who you were talking with, or if not, you have the option to just try some other servers until you find where everyone alse is. Were "server" is an actual seperate instance of the server software operated by an independant person, hosted on whatever kind of hardware or vm they set up, connected to whatever network they are on, not what Discord calls a "server".
Even if the entire group of say freenode servers goes down somehow (even though that's not really possible) there is still undernet and 400 other nets. Even without prior coordination it would be essentially trivial for the users to all just go looking for, or create on the spot, the same channel on some other net, and basically everyone finds each other again almost effortlessly. And that's if something unbelievable actually happens, let alone the normal minor breaks that actually happen once in a while.
This is entirely different from being wholly at the mercy of the single entity Discord.
Freenode had full-network outages periodically. ddos attacks, infrastructure failures etc. and when those happened, the practical experience was the same... people waited it out. Nobody coordinated a mass migration to undernet or stood up alternative servers for a few hours. (It took much bigger issues - social/organizational/political, not technical - to catalyze the mass migration.)
You're making an argument about the virtues of decentralization - and I agree, decentralization is great! Just in practical reality, freenode (not IRC itself) had exactly the same failure mode as we just saw today.
There was always oftc...
When irc servers go down or networks split, the users just hop on other servers if they actually want to keep talking with the same specific people they were.
The earlier comment posed the scenario of being high and dry when they needed to do basically support work with users.
If they don't care then they don't bother, but that doesn't change the fact that if the communication mattered to you, then you are not stuck the way the earlier comment said. You are only as stuck is you feel like. And not just because of the hyperbolic technicality that you can stand up your own new server. You could, but you never need to. There are countless servers already.
And there is no coordinated "mass migration" operation. The channel breaks, you just go browse a few other servers, or if it's exceptionally bad, maybe another network. It's effortless for each user. It takes 2 seconds. You're not trying 1000 other networks blindly either. You already know a few more popular/likely suspects to try first. And so does everyone else, and even when you guess "wrong" and go to dalnet and everyone else is on undernet, there will still be a channel on dalnet with a topic or a user telling you where to go. It's all just not a big deal. It took way more effort to write this comment explaining it than to actually deal with a net split and get back in communication with more or less everyone that was in whatever channel broke.
:P
The 00's were an interesting time in internet culture.
Internet slang like this disappeared almost completely once the whole world got access and platforms rooted out all the weird and niche communities.
Common IRC servers were not without problems. I think it was just more common to shrug it off and do something else until the problems went away.
Now, aws or cloudflare gets a hickup and half the internet is nuked.
The old internet was far more federated so doing something else meant to me "Welp, anandtech is down, let's go to pcper, digg, tomshardware, slashdot, etc"
Sure stuff would go down, but it would be just that small community rather than most of chat for the internet.
The more I sit down and try to remember how it actually was to use internet in late 00s, the only thing that always comes up is "there is no way people today would tolerate it nearly as well as we did back then".
Simple services recover faster. Federated infrastructure is much more resilient. We had slower computers, more considerate coders, and simpler software; so everything was snappier, even with 56K modems.
For example, navigate to https://git.sr.ht/~bayindirh/. No scripts, pure HTML. running on a single server. Served instantly.
This is possible. We, as in the world, just ignore it for shinier stones.
Now, a small VPS in an AWS server lapses for 5 seconds, and half of internet is toast. Centralization for the PWN!
I think the centralisation is the issue, I could connect to a different IRC network with a community around the same topic/game. When Discord is down there's nowhere else to go.
In the earlier days of IRC, netsplits were sometimes used for channel takeover. If someone was on a split off part of the net where there were so few people in the channel that they could obtain op status, they could kill and ban the "legitimate" ops when the nets joined back together.
We're hoping to do better than discord, hopefully you get some use from it!
Backend is written in go, frontend is vanilla html/js/css, TOS and PP are readable in one breath each.
edit: looks like nobody can see this unless it's vouched. I guess because of the link and VPN.
- No screenshots on front page, I have no idea what it looks like
- no video chat, no screen sharing
- No downloadable version isn't a feature. What's a PWA?
- "Live audio space" doesn't explain whether it's drop-in voice channels like discord/slack huddles or scheduled audio calls
- The name makes it sound like a Discord clone
From a technical perspective:
- Not FOSS, can't self-host or federate. What makes this less likely to rug pull than Discord/any of the other alternatives
- No information on who is making this
- No information on how messages are encrypted
- Webpage looks vaguely AI generated
- Bot API is A) hidden at the bottom of the very long tutorial, B) seems to be limited to normal user actions (I could be wrong!), and C) desperately needs an index or sidebar
- Unclear whether anonymous channels are truly anon or just anon on the client side
Some stuff seems neat: I am intrigued by anonymous channels and from your feature table it hits more table-stakes features than most Discord alternatives. But I would give it a few touch ups if you want it to stand out.
>no video chat, no screen sharing
Screen sharing and video chat were added just a few days ago, and I wanted to get that tested more before mentioning it so prominently.
>No downloadable version isn't a feature. What's a PWA?
At the moment, we're a small team, and not all engineers. None of us know Swift or Kotlin, but aren't against learning. Usage is something we want to see before investing that much time into writing these, so in the meantime, a PWA is the best middle ground.
One key differentiator from Discord is that we're not against third party clients, so if in the meantime someone comes out with one we're not going to make any efforts to stop it.
>The name makes it sound like a Discord clone
I see what you mean, if you had a magic wand, what would you call it?
>"Live audio space" doesn't explain whether it's drop-in voice channels like discord/slack huddles or scheduled audio calls
We have video now, but to answer directly, it's similar to a Space on X.
Thank you for the feedback, I will be working this weekend to make these things better articulated on the website!
> I see what you mean, if you had a magic wand, what would you call it?
Naming things is, of course, the hardest part of programming so somewhat hypocritically I can't say I have an answer :) . It probably depends more on what you view your target audience as and what your main selling point is. Discord worked as a name since it falls in line with a lot "gamer branding". If you have a theme going on I'd go with that, otherwise the age old traditions of picking a random communication related or mashing two words together (Linphone, Threema, Skype, etc) are probably the easiest.
Personally I think I'd go with "Microcosm" or something similar. Sounds cool, abbreviates well to just "micro". Or maybe something with "vox" in it. Honestly it probably doesn't matter too much, people will get used to saying anything.
Quite the contrary, this is the advice we needed.
>Everyone and their mom is making a Discord competitor these days
We did a significant amount of research into this and didn't find any contenders. Which services do you see that are competitors in the same space?
> We're rolling out to new regions over time to make sure we get things right.
> Stay tuned.
Dead before born.
(And maybe AI was to blame in WoW's case, but the speculation is baseless.)