Quick self-promo to my website: https://mirror.forum which can help people find some fluxer communities and also help migrate discord communities to fluxer. It also works for not just fluxer but also matrix and stoat as well.
I have submitted Fluxer 2 times on Hackernews if not more, I really really strongly believe that people of HN should look into it more & (maybe my website as well :D)
Just as friendly feedback, monospace fonts are difficult to read for me for that kind of content. The site also doesn’t explain what it is about. It says “terminal-grade communities” (whatever that means), but Fluxer doesn’t seem to be bound to terminals?
> Just as friendly feedback, monospace fonts are difficult to read for me for that kind of content.
Yes! Feedback is great and means a lot to me. I never thought about that. I do wonder though how do I exactly fix that as monospace is rather the core identity of my website. I might have to re-think the whole website but I will try to provide the ability for your own fonts. I would sincerely love some great feedback here as well because I had built it extremely with monospace in mind because I thought that it would look good. But perhaps it looks good but monospace is not practical here as you suggest. I can be wrong, I usually am and it was just me wishing to play with monospace fonts.
> says “terminal-grade communities” (whatever that means),
It just sort of reflected the style of it being terminal or (retro?) but if I have to answer what that means: It probably means nothing relevant, as such, I will remove it.
(Full story for those curious)
It was an experiment: I just had bought a domain out of an mirror: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47330475 (TLDR: someone on HN wanted to show someone else mirror so they showed mirror.org and It led to a very high price so I wondered what the cheapest mirror.<tld> which I like could be), mirror.online was available for 1st year for 1$ at Namecheap (I use tld-list.com to find cheap domain tlds)
(extreme side note I also have a custom tampermonkey script to sometimes find the cheapest one ie. completely available not premium domains but yeah I need to make the script slightly better)
[I built the project because the domain was idling and I wanted to experiment with the architecture of a pure golang binary with modernc sqlite and a 7$/yr VPS and https://owickstrom.github.io/the-monospace-web/ and I wanted a real project for that so I thought of it after discovering fluxer]
It is sadly vibe-coded. Thus the terminal-graded community comment. I am sorry if I didn't disclose it. I tried to show it to people and didn't get much response and so in the end, I was still happy with the experiment because I just wanted to tinker around but after its completion I was satisfied thus I didn't tinker more with it other than running it and showing it to my friends sometimes.
But knowing that a person cares about it to give me feedback enough makes me warrant to fix the changes that you've mentioned. I will try to fix them.
I will try to add an about-me page and make it better.
Though that being said, I think that the domain renewal is coming soon and I might sell the domain as renewal of 20$ is still slightly expensive for me for experiments (college student budget here!). If I do that, I will hopefully try to create a last archive.org pointing to a new subdomain of a more long lasting domain that I will try to have.
Fluxer has special "forum" areas that are meant to be searchable on the global web, and discussions in chat channels are private. Which is a much better approach for that issue than Discord "make every message from public servers searchable" imo.
It's already self-hostable witha single-client connection ability, and there's ongoing work to make the Fluxer site and all of the self-hosted servers able to federate (with a prototype planned for the end of the year)
I was like "Poob? Are we just making shit up now?"
So I googled it. And yes, we are, and that's the entire joke of Poob.
tbh, I kinda wanna make a Poob website now. The front page describes itself as the ultimate social media site where you can do anything, taking major inspiration from the classic Zombocom. Yet, there won't be a Register or Login button anywhere. Just a static site.
I'm tentatively hopeful. I think it's a disgrace how many communities have moved from the open internet into Discord, and at least this is continuing to move towards fixing a lot of the problems that migration caused. I do wonder why they chose now though, it seems like there's potentially a lot of value in keeping this data private, or at least selling it for a fee
Don't forget why this happened. Discourse and opinions counter to the narrative pulled people away from public discussion due to fear or reprisal / issues.
Reddit outside of some niche subs still largely deals with global thought policing.
On Reddit for example most of the popular subs would ban you for saying Israel's doing a genocide, even if it's relevant to the thread topic, e.g. if the topic is a news post about USA sending money to Israel.
You also can't call anyone or anything fascist, or say anything that an LLM can twist into being a call for violence. For a while they were banning anyone who said the word "Luigi".
Hell, some of the dev groups ban any discussion of USING llm's in code development. It's intentionally alienating and driving people away. Many of which I have found on Discord. Though even Discord seems to be having a moment of thought policing.
Not necessarily because they were scared, but probably a lot of them got banned or saw their friends get banned from Reddit, and couldn't get back on because Reddit has quite strong detection for ban evaders, so after the initial anger period, Reddit just disappeared from their mind altogether.
You can openly be a white supremacist on Twitter now. The reason some people still aren't happy is because what they really want is to be able to have terrible opinions and not be disliked and shunned, which isn't possible. Social repercussions and censorship are different things.
Right. Many communities and project teams saw a real need for an IRC replacement, whether literally or not, and Discord was the least bad choice simply by existing. And IRC channels were of course just as un-googlable without setting up a logging bot and a crawlable archive.
I don't think this is true for most people on the big issues but do think it's true for a lot of small issues. Reddit (and HN) lead to a lot of pageant show dynamics where the people with the time to hit the buttons decide what content to boost. Small Discord communities are free from that.
Discord is popular because a very significant amount of people prefer the casual social instant chatting aspect over the slower threaded style of forums, especially young people.
I'm in 1 Discord for Gaming, the rest (about 45) are all non gaming related (though discussions sometimes happen). Including AI, Development, Art, Music, etc. I think Discord has a wider audience that many aren't aware of.
I'm on 3 high school and 5 college servers. It's not just for games. Most companies won't use it for work because they have a pretty bad security record and no enterprise features, but it's perfect for any small to mid size community.
I "own" a Discord server for my WoW guild and I'm not particularly happy about being on it, but it's the default choice for gamers and voice chat. It would kill our raid team's recruiting if we told people they had to install some obscure service instead of Discord if they wanted to raid with us.
> You're not an actor but a spectator, unless you own a Discord server
Nobody owns Discord servers except Discord's server admins. I don't mean the glorified mods of glorified channel groups, I mean the real admins of the real servers!
It however brings disadvantages with it. Specifically if now instead of a forum you have to join five trillion discord servers just to get help with your one issue on "this niche product i use".
I'm not a fan of the change. I wanted Discord to remain it's little walled garden so I could continue to ignore it. It's a terrible experience in every way and I genuinely have zero idea why anyone uses it.
It used to be. The core offering is still functional. But with every update it becomes less usable. Orbs, badges, glittery avatar borders, aggressively animated, rainbow gradient text usernames, and now ads embedded directly into the UI.
none of that makes it less usable. That side bar where its shown is mostly just to see who is online and I found for many users, they don't even have that bar showing. The core chat/voice/streaming is just as functional as ever.
It's actually not just as functional as ever. Quality of voice and video chat took a noticeable dive this year, maybe coincidentally right as vibe coding really took off in the industry. And all that extra crap might not make discord unusable but it does suck. Like I said, not great.
Both the groups I have regular video calls with noticed, to the point that one of them switched back to zoom. It seems to have gotten better the last few months, though I don't think it's quite back to the near-flawless peak it was on in, say, 2024.
Animations from peoples' names and from their super reactions playing over other content after happening to move my mouse over them is something I'd consider a slight usability issue.
For me all these things are good except the last one (if you mean partner games in the bottom left corner, I hope they're not A/B testing Google Ads in the app). My profile is more low key but I don't hate others for going heavy on the effects. It's just self expression.
What I don't like is the way they used to sell Nitro before they came up with the flashy cosmetics, restricting features that used to be free. And how they used a third party service for UK age verification that ended up hacked. And their security record in general. And being closed source with no official export tools.
I've used it once. It worked to recover some messages from DMs that were far enough down in my history they were no longer shown in the web/desktop UI. However, it only included my own messages in each DM/channel, without the context of whoever I was talking to.
it's a super low-friction text, voice & screenshare program with support for your whole WoW guild (or whatever communities) and you have "genuinely zero idea" why people use it?
Hey, I am that guy that founded that one obscure Linux distro. And yes, it is better than whatever one you use at supply chain security if nothing else. ;)
Really though, I do think people often equate popularity with being a healthy default solution for society.
A lot of people enjoy mcdonalds, and hell even I cave and buy it once in a while, but popular does not mean it is a healthy default for society.
The corpos are incentivized to addict you and trap you. Not to give you the best solution.
If one actually does research beyond "but all my friends use it" they would see Discord is objectively one of the worst things to happen to sovereign and privacy preserving communication on the internet in a long time. Tech communities using it should know better.
Whenever I see an open source project that says "Join my Discord" without any alternatives, I close the tab. If a technical project cannot find an hour to figure out how to setup a chat with their community without mandating use of a surveillance capitalism product, our goals are already too far apart.
> [chat]... without mandating use of a surveillance capitalism product
Sooooooo what is your solution?
You just described every single, non-E2E communication product, because they are all indexed and used by surveillance capitalism, including governments and corporations.
IRC and Matrix are self hostable and end to end encrypted. There is no good reason for tech communities to lock themselves into Discord and exclude anyone that does not agree to their corporate terms of service.
Discord is a mediocre chat medium - I don't mind using it, but it wouldn't be my first choice.
But people use it to store all information about some games - effectively replacing a wiki. And it is AWFUL for that. Everything about Discord makes it bad for that
What do you find so bad about Discord's search functionality?
Because I see this complaint a lot, but I've personally never had any real problems with it, and it seems to cover pretty much all of the bases I'd want in a search for this kind of platform.
Because it's not semantic search, it's text search. You don't search Discord like you search Google, which is a problem when it is used as a wiki replacement.
It's not even text search. I can know the exact text I'm looking for and get messages that use completely different words just because Discord tries to group related words together when indexing. It's like some lobotomized collated word search, since it doesn't support symbols or quotes either.
Discord's text search is a simple intersection-of-all-words search, with some filters slapped on top. And it's not even the word you typed, it's all words that seem maybe semantically equivalent or similar. When I know the exact word I want to search for (e.g. "loves"), it sucks to always get results for every other related word (e.g. "love", "loved", "loving"). Maybe it'd be a useful feature if it had a toggle, but it doesn't. Some other words that have problems with this are time/times, caring/care, wanting/want/wants, and fucking allowance/allow/allows. Seriously?? Allowance is treated the same as allow??
Can't search for or with symbols. Lots of search engines have this issue. Just ignores them. Want to search for instances of ":3"? You're actually searching for instances of "3". Not much else to say on this other than it's annoying.
I assumed some ulterior motive. Did they pick the cheap option?
Why would they have left their userbase in the same lackluster search situation for so many years… maybe genuinely massive backlog and improved search won’t improve their numbers like $otherPriority?
Discord is very hard to understand for me. But the young people love it for some reason. Had to use it for some projects or hackatons, and it's still a mystery why it's so popular. No one found older links that were deeper in the chats, had to constantly tag people to see anything, random chats pushed the important information away. It was overall terrible for everyone yet everyone still loves it.
And weirdly, I then understood that there's no real global platform for a quick chat that everyone knows and CAN actively use. In universities we use Teams, but beyond that people are never active there...
But I also don't understand Twitter or Mastodon. It feels like there's so much better ways to both post stuff and reach people.
I think you could probably just say "it became popular because it's free and everyone could use it to game with friends". Those of us that have fallen out of gaming or people that don't game might not literally have any idea why anyone uses it. So you could both be right. You are taking their zero to one by providing the answer.
I think there is a whole generation of people that have very fond memories of discord and everyone outside that window does not have that connection at all.
An addendum to that might be that other people have used other services before discord even existed that had better (?) feature sets but didn't win out and that can create confusion because neither group of people understands what the other group is talking about because there is no shared experience.
Its main draw isn't explicitly gaming, but where your social interactions more often align with that of a friend group / in a group chat dynamic where everyone's talking with everyone or hangs out together at similar times. Gaming is just how it started, because nearly all gaming groups have this sort of social dynamic. (Obviously Discord does support DMs)
The fact that it also scales up to handle hundreds or thousands of concurrent users made it work for pretty much everyone. Suddenly you had one place you could go where there were thousands of other people all interested in the same thing you were interested in, and could meet new people or new friend groups over that said shared interest.
It also absolutely needed:
- persistent, non-disappearing text chats that last forever*
- Free image uploads (and thus meme sharing)
- voice chat & screen sharing, proxied (so no DDOS attacks after a malicious person grabs your IP in a public voice chat)
- role-based access control, so you could have an announcements chat for your server where only admins can say things, you can appoint certain people as moderators, etc
- a mobile app with push notifications (to mimic the text message paradigm of being always available to chat with your friends)
- Discord building out the ability to connect custom bots so early
*: No word yet on if they'll ever start cleaning up old messages and attachments. There must be hundreds of petabytes of attachments stored in multi-AZ google cloud buckets that will never be accessed ever again.
- Subscribe to Nitro to use these emojis! (Every time you open the emoji picker)
- Did you know there are username styles now?
- Subscribe to Nitro to use animated avatars!
- Did you know there are per-server profiles now? (If you subscribe to Nitro!)
- Boost this server! (With Nitro)
- Here's a GIFs button that is forever part of the textbox buttons.
- Here's a Stickers button that is forever part of the textbox buttons.
- Here's an Apps button that is forever part of the textbox buttons. Just kidding, now it forever sits next to the textbox!
(A third of your horizontal screen estate is now textbox buttons)
- Here's a dedicated Gift button so you can buy Nitro for your friends too! In the textbox buttons.
- We have polls! Not in the textbox buttons though. It's in the same submenu as opening the file picker! Oh, did we mention you need an extra click to open the file picker now? (Why would we put it in the textbox buttons when we only put things there that upsell Nitro?)
- Did you know our new noise suppression is sponsored by Krisp? (Plasters Krisp logo everywhere)
- Have you played this game in Roblox yet?
- Verify your phone number to keep using Discord.
- Verify your ID to keep using Discord.
- Did you know which of your friends are playing games right now? (You can't turn this off)
- Earn Orbs by joining your friend in this sponsored game!
- Subscribe to Nitro for increased stream resolution!
- Did you know Nitro subscribers get 3 months of Xbox Game Pass free?
- Did you know Nitro subscribers get 1 month of Xbox Game Pass free?
- Did you know Xbox Game Pass subscribers get 3 months of Discord Nitro free??
- Did you know you can get a longer message length limit with Nitro?
I say this as someone who's used Discord basically daily since 2016. They are so much more bloated than they were, it's insane. And a lot of these are things nobody wants, not just stuff I personally didn't ask for.
Here's an easy example. Every discord client now ships with Krisp, and many clients squelch settings were automatically changed from standard to Krisp when this feature launched.
That change was many many years ago. I personally find Krisp super efficient (no adverse CPU usage or anything) and highly useful. It's better than Apple's 'noise isolation' at not picking up e.g. sharp / fast / heavy breathing.
Discord is my favorite communication platform on the internet. It combines everything useful that was offered by older platforms like IRC, Skype and TeamSpeak, and provides that with a modern UI.
For me, it also helps that all of my favorite communities are on it.
could you be specific? It has pockmarks for sure. tacky upsells, cringy gamification, horrible resource consumption (mine runs at like 800mb of ram or more). Oh yeah inconvenient updates.
but still probably the best signal/noise community experience out there. and great customizations.
As someone who hit the PC gaming world in around 2008 online, we started with TeamSpeak and Ventrilo which were hosted platforms that allowed you to voice chat with your friends. They had cost money and weren't that great on audio quality (from that time).
Then we went to separate game specific voice chat platforms which were inconsistent, but meant you struggled to find a way to chat with mates outside of something like Skype at the time.
Discord was one of the first platforms that was firstly free and allowed you one place to chat with friends and communities about games AND had very good quality audio.
People use it for all sorts of things, however I use it fairly minimally and only to be able to voice chat with friends either when gaming together or playing separate games. I don't get understand some peoples problems with it, it works better than anything else out there for what I use it for.
"it's a disgrace how many communities have moved from the open internet into Discord"
Why? Its primary use for me is having small, private communities of people who aren't entirely anonymous to eachother and isn't scraped (too much), commodified and filtered through an algorithm like most of the open internet. I would hate it if suddenly it became like reddit or facebook.
The open web really went down a bad path well over a decade ago and I think its time to hard-turn away from it until things get better. The benefits of everyone abandoning the open web are considerable.
Some people are annoyed because discord doesn't have the archival capacity of an old fasioned message board, and if that's your problem with it you're right, but I think the benefits of fluid accessibility and relative privacy outweigh the problems at the moment.
It's almost like there are different-sized Discords out there, and some people (e.g. you) use only the small ones, while other people are different, and some of them use large Discords.
For channels with over 1000 members. I think you have to opt in for your server to be discoverable. Looks like the public message feature is opt out rather than opt in if the server is discoverable.
This seems like it would alleviate part of the concern I see on HN a lot regarding open source projects keeping their knowledge bases on isolated and unsearchable discord servers. It's still on a proprietary platform but this might be an improvement overall.
I think that it can be a good change depending on how you interpret it but suppose it becomes part of Google search engine then, wouldn't it allow Google's AI quick summary to search/scrape that and have it part of training process
Or having all of the search/scrape data itself be part of the training process of Google/other's AI process?
A quick LLM search gives me the answer as a "maybe", but knowing the financial incentives at hand and why Discord might be opening up. I remain slightly skeptical as to why Discord wishes to open up to Google*
they aren't opening up to google specifically. any search engine will be able to index the content on the server web pages.
>but knowing the financial incentives at hand and why Discord might be opening up.
one of the biggest complaints about discord (other than all of the grooming and such) is that communities move to discord and then all of their (previously freely available) information is locked behind a login.
addressing a big complaint that many people have about your service is a good financial move.
> they aren't opening up to google specifically. any search engine will be able to index the content on the server web pages.
My apologies. I didn't see that and skimmed through the web-page and I thought that it was a discord-google specific deal.
> one of the biggest complaints about discord (other than all of the grooming and such) is that communities move to discord and then all of their (previously freely available) information is locked behind a login.
> addressing a big complaint that many people have about your service is a good financial move.
True, that can very well be the case but my question of AI training still stands. Couldn't this make many discord texts/discussions part of AI training corpus and AI models as has been the case for many such situations.
I but am just slightly worried about all the AI training that can happen but other than that, its a good change!
>one of the biggest complaints about discord (other than all of the grooming and such) is that communities move to discord and then all of their (previously freely available) information is locked behind a login.
Based on what I've read, there will be a short summary then you are given the login page. Not unlike a paywalled news website. Still an improvement, but it does not fully address this criticism.
I'm always so conflicted about editing article titles like this for posts. I stick to original titles since that's the rules but it's tempting not to every time I see a post hit front page with good hooks edited in. These edits clearly work and rarely seem to be punished.
The FAQ at the bottom of the article says it'll default to off for people in the EU, the UK, Canada, Brazil, Australia, and South Korea. Are you in one of those places?
Ah thanks for the correction! And yes I'm on that list. I just heard that and was coming back to make a correction so I'm happy to hear someone got to it before me.
Not a fan of it requiring a certain number of members/level of activity/server status. My experience is that many of the communities hit hardest by Discord's login requirements aren't all that large, like speedrun communities for niche games, modding and ROM hacking communities for certain games, etc.
I feel like it should be opt in/out regardless of the size of the server and amount of activity it has.
I don't like how information is siloed in discord but making this change retroactively is dangerous. And the option to opt out is only useful to those who know about it.
It's about time! I wish Slack would offer this feature too for people who want it. I think it's going to be great for open-source, open-communication types of projects and organizations and it's well needed for the world!
With this announcement, I'm actually interested in studying the discord and participating in discord servers now! I'd much rather participate in an open garden than a closed garden.
That's my read on it, they might use this to treat these messages as public information to be packaged and resold like how Reddit can rather than it being a place where people have an expectation of privacy.
Discord has been available for training data for at least some months. I used duckduckgo to search information on my gamertag and whichever AI they were using at the time came up with results that would have only been available had it used Discord's data.
I really like discord. This seems like a good move, there is plenty of information locked inside discord at the moment. For instance I'm part of the Wooting keyboard discord and there's a lot info there on problem solving, customizing, etc. There are tons of other discords like this, especially for games. I personally have a dota2 guild discord, but none of these are likely to be searchable as mostly they are private (often with public invite links somewhere) and don't have many users (I think mines at 180ish).
i think this is good. i miss old forums, and i do want information accessible like it was in the old forum days.
that being said, my internet history from when i was 13 is on some discord servers at risk of going public. ive been letting that stuff remain up for sentimentality reasons, but it seems i will need to do a wipe of some old servers i have been on just in case. been meaning to do this for years, but this is whats making me finally feel the need to do it. (i got lucky and the forums where the rest of my teenage internet activity was have all been wiped for years.)
The real risk here isn't AI training - It's deanonymization. People posted in a "private" community under nicknames.
However, the server administrator enables the "discoverability" feature for everyone. So the entire history of members who never chose this option suddenly becomes discoverable and linked to their accounts. Use the same nickname on GitHub or X - and in a matter of seconds, it will point to the same person.
The only thing server owners control is whether the server is public or not. They can’t set this particular aspect of it on or off, only individual users can.
As for turning a public server private or vice versa, that’s a very noticeable and impactful decision in lots of ways already.
server owners have setting toggles to opt the server out of having public facing channel history or ai channel summaries. a server can remain discoverable and have the history and summaries off for the public webpage of the server.
This is only for public servers. If you were using a nickname on _public servers_ that was easy to identify before, then that was already a big mistake.
And this feature does not affect old messages - only ones after December 2026.
It's not just that. It brings with it all the SEO bullshit that places like Reddit have. Everything has to be over moderated because it's a target for SEO spam.
This is needed, but likely not enough yet. With the rise of Discord servers as community forums, we've lost the wealth of Q&A they used to provide. Being able to search for a user with the same issue as you and find it was no small part of what's let us all learn to program in the first place, as well as critical to the training data that powers the AIs we use to answer similar questions more quickly.
There will always be new questions, one that even AI cannot figure out alone. Things that require other environments or polled feedback. Making these channels indexable on the internet is critical to the progress of information.
I'm a Discord server admin and I'd love to turn this on because having more discussion of my game indexable by search engines seems like a good thing in general. For new messages it seems like there's no problem, in combination with the opt-out option. But for existing users, how am I supposed to disclose the change to people? What if people posted content in the past and wouldn't want it on Google, but aren't active anymore?
Furthermore, what if someone wants to opt-out of their messages being indexed in some Discord servers but not others? I don't see that option being available right now.
The same as with introduction of indexing web pages by any search engine few decades ago, if you posted on a forum that was public accessible, your posts were indexed without your input.
Sure, but privacy-conscious individuals can simply not participate in those servers. The person I was replying to was acting like you have to give up your phone number to use Discord at all.
Back in the old days (tm) you would post (maybe under a pseudonym) in the internet and dont care that much. Someone could theoretically stalk you through all the sites with moderate effort and depending on how far back we are on the timeline, but still, the Internet felt somewhat private (an illusion) sure, but for a vast amount of people, your post on furry-forum-24 was probably never seeing the light of day outside of that specific space and then it got shuttered 2007. LLMs make that so easy, filing everything away, the web is already thousand times crawled over, but now there are handy tools to search it more easily, with vague concepts, see patterns with a way much bigger working brain so to speak.
I myself are quite reluncatant to write anything on the internet these days that is to personal, which is a censorship in itself. I am not sure how it is in actual oppressive censorship states like china or the usa (if you got a left-ish opinion) but the will to not write anything personal is a loss of connection to strangers that was definetly there before. Usually in tiny tidbits that were harmless in itself. But now one can trivially gather all those tiny specs of data so easy..makes it hard to say anything anymore.
Same if you are averse of helping the slop machine of getting more art, texts or thoughts.
Unlike so many people here, I think discord not being indexed by search engine is pretty OK and is even a feature. All other spaces of internet have been invaded by bots, astroturfing, sucking every single bit of data possible... The more the data is easily scrapable, the more it enshittifies everything around it. Moreover people don't behave the same knowing that something is private vs something is public (yes things are mostly public on discord, but at least there's a sense that someone has to actively look for your messages instead of having them indexed by default)
This is a very important and good change. Currently Discord communities are black holes of information.
Especially for communities that have valuable discussions and support going on in Discord, Obsidian or Astro come to my mind, this is super helpful.
I do wonder about their motivations behind this, making the web a more open and user friendly place is obviously good for the users, how does Discord profit from this? Forcing users into creating an account to view valuable information seemed like a profitable thing for Discord.
The servers I've joined typically have a lobby where you land right after joiming, and you need an admin to approve you before you get access to the actual channels
All privacy is just extra layers from the public. They want to remove all those layers (which in this case is just the barrier to entry of writing API calls)
This is very bad, due to the fact that, while Discord is used as private and server messaging app/website, it could expose secrets that users might be telling people in their private chat.
privacyishuman | 13 hours ago
Imustaskforhelp | 13 hours ago
Quick self-promo to my website: https://mirror.forum which can help people find some fluxer communities and also help migrate discord communities to fluxer. It also works for not just fluxer but also matrix and stoat as well.
I have submitted Fluxer 2 times on Hackernews if not more, I really really strongly believe that people of HN should look into it more & (maybe my website as well :D)
layer8 | 12 hours ago
Imustaskforhelp | 12 hours ago
Yes! Feedback is great and means a lot to me. I never thought about that. I do wonder though how do I exactly fix that as monospace is rather the core identity of my website. I might have to re-think the whole website but I will try to provide the ability for your own fonts. I would sincerely love some great feedback here as well because I had built it extremely with monospace in mind because I thought that it would look good. But perhaps it looks good but monospace is not practical here as you suggest. I can be wrong, I usually am and it was just me wishing to play with monospace fonts.
> says “terminal-grade communities” (whatever that means),
It just sort of reflected the style of it being terminal or (retro?) but if I have to answer what that means: It probably means nothing relevant, as such, I will remove it.
(Full story for those curious)
It was an experiment: I just had bought a domain out of an mirror: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47330475 (TLDR: someone on HN wanted to show someone else mirror so they showed mirror.org and It led to a very high price so I wondered what the cheapest mirror.<tld> which I like could be), mirror.online was available for 1st year for 1$ at Namecheap (I use tld-list.com to find cheap domain tlds)
(extreme side note I also have a custom tampermonkey script to sometimes find the cheapest one ie. completely available not premium domains but yeah I need to make the script slightly better)
[I built the project because the domain was idling and I wanted to experiment with the architecture of a pure golang binary with modernc sqlite and a 7$/yr VPS and https://owickstrom.github.io/the-monospace-web/ and I wanted a real project for that so I thought of it after discovering fluxer]
It is sadly vibe-coded. Thus the terminal-graded community comment. I am sorry if I didn't disclose it. I tried to show it to people and didn't get much response and so in the end, I was still happy with the experiment because I just wanted to tinker around but after its completion I was satisfied thus I didn't tinker more with it other than running it and showing it to my friends sometimes.
But knowing that a person cares about it to give me feedback enough makes me warrant to fix the changes that you've mentioned. I will try to fix them.
I will try to add an about-me page and make it better.
Though that being said, I think that the domain renewal is coming soon and I might sell the domain as renewal of 20$ is still slightly expensive for me for experiments (college student budget here!). If I do that, I will hopefully try to create a last archive.org pointing to a new subdomain of a more long lasting domain that I will try to have.
Have a nice day :-D
pavel_lishin | 13 hours ago
DexesTTP | 12 hours ago
john_strinlai | 13 hours ago
DexesTTP | 12 hours ago
hmartin | 12 hours ago
Zambyte | 11 hours ago
AFAIK, Zulip doesn't have any sort of built in calling, streaming, etc. right? Fluxer has that I'm addition to the Discord style chat features.
nozzlegear | 11 hours ago
It's on Poob. Poob has it for you.
Sohcahtoa82 | 8 hours ago
So I googled it. And yes, we are, and that's the entire joke of Poob.
tbh, I kinda wanna make a Poob website now. The front page describes itself as the ultimate social media site where you can do anything, taking major inspiration from the classic Zombocom. Yet, there won't be a Register or Login button anywhere. Just a static site.
onel | 6 hours ago
BorisMelnik | 12 hours ago
legohead | 8 hours ago
Try new Y thing! it doesn't do annoying Z thing!
Oh no, Y added annoying Z thing! how come nobody saw this coming :(
SOTGO | 13 hours ago
ganoushoreilly | 12 hours ago
Reddit outside of some niche subs still largely deals with global thought policing.
Freedom2 | 12 hours ago
cowlevel | 12 hours ago
You also can't call anyone or anything fascist, or say anything that an LLM can twist into being a call for violence. For a while they were banning anyone who said the word "Luigi".
ganoushoreilly | 12 hours ago
mvdtnz | 11 hours ago
ganoushoreilly | 11 hours ago
john_strinlai | 12 hours ago
axus | 12 hours ago
ganoushoreilly | 12 hours ago
john_strinlai | 12 hours ago
in any case, i dont think the "hunter biden laptop" discord group is opting into this feature.
cowlevel | 12 hours ago
add-sub-mul-div | 12 hours ago
devilsdata | 12 hours ago
Sharlin | 11 hours ago
Karrot_Kream | 12 hours ago
JDups | 12 hours ago
nitwit005 | 12 hours ago
The most popular servers are for AI companies, and video games.
Which is not too surprising for a platform heavily designed around supporting video gaming.
ganoushoreilly | 11 hours ago
nitwit005 | 11 hours ago
The themes are pretty clear, and having a political discussion does not appear prominent.
tancop | 11 hours ago
nitwit005 | 10 hours ago
nozzlegear | 11 hours ago
moralestapia | 12 hours ago
This was a feature.
This was desired.
This was welcomed by all actors involved.
(You're not an actor but a spectator, unless you own a Discord server)
nozzlegear | 11 hours ago
These are just network effects.
urbnspacecowboy | 8 hours ago
Nobody owns Discord servers except Discord's server admins. I don't mean the glorified mods of glorified channel groups, I mean the real admins of the real servers!
mastermage | an hour ago
madrox | 12 hours ago
gdulli | 12 hours ago
burnte | 11 hours ago
andrewflnr | 11 hours ago
mostlysimilar | 11 hours ago
keithnz | 11 hours ago
andrewflnr | 11 hours ago
marshray | 9 hours ago
andrewflnr | 8 hours ago
jacobgkau | 10 hours ago
andrewflnr | 8 hours ago
tancop | 11 hours ago
What I don't like is the way they used to sell Nitro before they came up with the flashy cosmetics, restricting features that used to be free. And how they used a third party service for UK age verification that ended up hacked. And their security record in general. And being closed source with no official export tools.
I guess its all subjective.
jacobgkau | 10 hours ago
There actually is technically an official method to request a copy of your own data (think Google Takeout): https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004027692-R...
I've used it once. It worked to recover some messages from DMs that were far enough down in my history they were no longer shown in the web/desktop UI. However, it only included my own messages in each DM/channel, without the context of whoever I was talking to.
bananzamba | 7 hours ago
jamesfinlayson | 6 hours ago
Chat room is fine though.
fallingbananna | 5 hours ago
john_strinlai | 11 hours ago
it's a super low-friction text, voice & screenshare program with support for your whole WoW guild (or whatever communities) and you have "genuinely zero idea" why people use it?
anthonypasq | 11 hours ago
how could anyone possible enjoy x mainstream thing, i only use y hyper niche thing that signals my status to tech nerds.
queue the guy talking about the most obscure linux distro you can possibly imagine.
yangm97 | 11 hours ago
keithnz | 11 hours ago
lrvick | 11 hours ago
Really though, I do think people often equate popularity with being a healthy default solution for society.
A lot of people enjoy mcdonalds, and hell even I cave and buy it once in a while, but popular does not mean it is a healthy default for society.
The corpos are incentivized to addict you and trap you. Not to give you the best solution.
If one actually does research beyond "but all my friends use it" they would see Discord is objectively one of the worst things to happen to sovereign and privacy preserving communication on the internet in a long time. Tech communities using it should know better.
Whenever I see an open source project that says "Join my Discord" without any alternatives, I close the tab. If a technical project cannot find an hour to figure out how to setup a chat with their community without mandating use of a surveillance capitalism product, our goals are already too far apart.
esseph | 8 hours ago
Sooooooo what is your solution?
You just described every single, non-E2E communication product, because they are all indexed and used by surveillance capitalism, including governments and corporations.
Your problem isn't the tools, it's the internet.
lrvick | an hour ago
RHSeeger | 11 hours ago
But people use it to store all information about some games - effectively replacing a wiki. And it is AWFUL for that. Everything about Discord makes it bad for that
- Can't be found in search engines
- Abysmal search functionality
- Abysmal discoverability
nantangitan | 9 hours ago
desolate_muffin | 9 hours ago
LoganDark | 8 hours ago
LoganDark | 8 hours ago
Can't search for or with symbols. Lots of search engines have this issue. Just ignores them. Want to search for instances of ":3"? You're actually searching for instances of "3". Not much else to say on this other than it's annoying.
demibabs | 3 hours ago
Barbing | an hour ago
Why would they have left their userbase in the same lackluster search situation for so many years… maybe genuinely massive backlog and improved search won’t improve their numbers like $otherPriority?
5555watch | 5 hours ago
And weirdly, I then understood that there's no real global platform for a quick chat that everyone knows and CAN actively use. In universities we use Teams, but beyond that people are never active there...
But I also don't understand Twitter or Mastodon. It feels like there's so much better ways to both post stuff and reach people.
justsomehnguy | 11 hours ago
is the key here
the same reason WhatsApp and Telegram won on their markets
plant-ian | 11 hours ago
I think there is a whole generation of people that have very fond memories of discord and everyone outside that window does not have that connection at all.
An addendum to that might be that other people have used other services before discord even existed that had better (?) feature sets but didn't win out and that can create confusion because neither group of people understands what the other group is talking about because there is no shared experience.
morkalork | 10 hours ago
But half the good is that they are not some wide-open, forever-indexed forum like reddit.
judge2020 | 7 hours ago
The fact that it also scales up to handle hundreds or thousands of concurrent users made it work for pretty much everyone. Suddenly you had one place you could go where there were thousands of other people all interested in the same thing you were interested in, and could meet new people or new friend groups over that said shared interest.
It also absolutely needed:
- persistent, non-disappearing text chats that last forever*
- Free image uploads (and thus meme sharing)
- voice chat & screen sharing, proxied (so no DDOS attacks after a malicious person grabs your IP in a public voice chat)
- role-based access control, so you could have an announcements chat for your server where only admins can say things, you can appoint certain people as moderators, etc
- a mobile app with push notifications (to mimic the text message paradigm of being always available to chat with your friends)
- Discord building out the ability to connect custom bots so early
*: No word yet on if they'll ever start cleaning up old messages and attachments. There must be hundreds of petabytes of attachments stored in multi-AZ google cloud buckets that will never be accessed ever again.
WheatMillington | 9 hours ago
Yiin | 9 hours ago
LoganDark | 9 hours ago
- Remember to gift Nitro to your friends!
- Have you played any Quests to get any Orbs?
- Did you know about Discord Nitro?
- Did you know there are server tags now?
- Did you know this server has a server tag?
- Did you know this server has a server tag?
- Did you know this server has a server tag?
- Did you know this server has a server tag?
- Did you know this server has a server tag?
- Subscribe to Nitro to use these emojis! (Every time you open the emoji picker)
- Did you know there are username styles now?
- Subscribe to Nitro to use animated avatars!
- Did you know there are per-server profiles now? (If you subscribe to Nitro!)
- Boost this server! (With Nitro)
- Here's a GIFs button that is forever part of the textbox buttons.
- Here's a Stickers button that is forever part of the textbox buttons.
- Here's an Apps button that is forever part of the textbox buttons. Just kidding, now it forever sits next to the textbox!
(A third of your horizontal screen estate is now textbox buttons)
- Here's a dedicated Gift button so you can buy Nitro for your friends too! In the textbox buttons.
- We have polls! Not in the textbox buttons though. It's in the same submenu as opening the file picker! Oh, did we mention you need an extra click to open the file picker now? (Why would we put it in the textbox buttons when we only put things there that upsell Nitro?)
- Did you know our new noise suppression is sponsored by Krisp? (Plasters Krisp logo everywhere)
- Have you played this game in Roblox yet?
- Verify your phone number to keep using Discord.
- Verify your ID to keep using Discord.
- Did you know which of your friends are playing games right now? (You can't turn this off)
- Earn Orbs by joining your friend in this sponsored game!
- Subscribe to Nitro for increased stream resolution!
- Did you know Nitro subscribers get 3 months of Xbox Game Pass free?
- Did you know Nitro subscribers get 1 month of Xbox Game Pass free?
- Did you know Xbox Game Pass subscribers get 3 months of Discord Nitro free??
- Did you know you can get a longer message length limit with Nitro?
I say this as someone who's used Discord basically daily since 2016. They are so much more bloated than they were, it's insane. And a lot of these are things nobody wants, not just stuff I personally didn't ask for.
pprotas | 30 minutes ago
bevr1337 | 8 hours ago
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040843952-K...
judge2020 | 7 hours ago
sharts | 49 minutes ago
ElijahLynn | 11 hours ago
Aozora7 | 10 hours ago
For me, it also helps that all of my favorite communities are on it.
tonymet | 9 hours ago
but still probably the best signal/noise community experience out there. and great customizations.
better than slack, or any competitors.
and if you say IRC i quit.
NoPicklez | 6 hours ago
Then we went to separate game specific voice chat platforms which were inconsistent, but meant you struggled to find a way to chat with mates outside of something like Skype at the time.
Discord was one of the first platforms that was firstly free and allowed you one place to chat with friends and communities about games AND had very good quality audio.
People use it for all sorts of things, however I use it fairly minimally and only to be able to voice chat with friends either when gaming together or playing separate games. I don't get understand some peoples problems with it, it works better than anything else out there for what I use it for.
Morromist | 10 hours ago
Why? Its primary use for me is having small, private communities of people who aren't entirely anonymous to eachother and isn't scraped (too much), commodified and filtered through an algorithm like most of the open internet. I would hate it if suddenly it became like reddit or facebook.
The open web really went down a bad path well over a decade ago and I think its time to hard-turn away from it until things get better. The benefits of everyone abandoning the open web are considerable.
Some people are annoyed because discord doesn't have the archival capacity of an old fasioned message board, and if that's your problem with it you're right, but I think the benefits of fluid accessibility and relative privacy outweigh the problems at the moment.
hungryhobbit | 10 hours ago
flxngll | 13 hours ago
samtheDamned | 13 hours ago
Imustaskforhelp | 13 hours ago
Or having all of the search/scrape data itself be part of the training process of Google/other's AI process?
A quick LLM search gives me the answer as a "maybe", but knowing the financial incentives at hand and why Discord might be opening up. I remain slightly skeptical as to why Discord wishes to open up to Google*
john_strinlai | 12 hours ago
they aren't opening up to google specifically. any search engine will be able to index the content on the server web pages.
>but knowing the financial incentives at hand and why Discord might be opening up.
one of the biggest complaints about discord (other than all of the grooming and such) is that communities move to discord and then all of their (previously freely available) information is locked behind a login.
addressing a big complaint that many people have about your service is a good financial move.
Imustaskforhelp | 12 hours ago
My apologies. I didn't see that and skimmed through the web-page and I thought that it was a discord-google specific deal.
> one of the biggest complaints about discord (other than all of the grooming and such) is that communities move to discord and then all of their (previously freely available) information is locked behind a login.
> addressing a big complaint that many people have about your service is a good financial move.
True, that can very well be the case but my question of AI training still stands. Couldn't this make many discord texts/discussions part of AI training corpus and AI models as has been the case for many such situations.
I but am just slightly worried about all the AI training that can happen but other than that, its a good change!
tomstockmail | 10 hours ago
Based on what I've read, there will be a short summary then you are given the login page. Not unlike a paywalled news website. Still an improvement, but it does not fully address this criticism.
freediver | 13 hours ago
rdmuser | 12 hours ago
Barbing | an hour ago
myself248 | 12 hours ago
Sohcahtoa82 | 8 hours ago
NooneAtAll5 | 11 hours ago
jbrooks84 | 8 hours ago
rdmuser | 12 hours ago
jacobgkau | 10 hours ago
rdmuser | 7 hours ago
CM30 | 12 hours ago
I feel like it should be opt in/out regardless of the size of the server and amount of activity it has.
bryanhogan | 7 hours ago
johnneville | 4 hours ago
sohrob | 11 hours ago
mvdtnz | 11 hours ago
ElijahLynn | 11 hours ago
With this announcement, I'm actually interested in studying the discord and participating in discord servers now! I'd much rather participate in an open garden than a closed garden.
ibejoeb | 11 hours ago
geobica | 11 hours ago
ghastmaster | 7 hours ago
keithnz | 11 hours ago
xkcd-sucks | 11 hours ago
nixonaddiction | 11 hours ago
that being said, my internet history from when i was 13 is on some discord servers at risk of going public. ive been letting that stuff remain up for sentimentality reasons, but it seems i will need to do a wipe of some old servers i have been on just in case. been meaning to do this for years, but this is whats making me finally feel the need to do it. (i got lucky and the forums where the rest of my teenage internet activity was have all been wiped for years.)
CreepyHunterX | 10 hours ago
However, the server administrator enables the "discoverability" feature for everyone. So the entire history of members who never chose this option suddenly becomes discoverable and linked to their accounts. Use the same nickname on GitHub or X - and in a matter of seconds, it will point to the same person.
EA-3167 | 10 hours ago
As for turning a public server private or vice versa, that’s a very noticeable and impactful decision in lots of ways already.
johnneville | 10 hours ago
daveidol | 8 hours ago
And this feature does not affect old messages - only ones after December 2026.
pampas | 6 hours ago
nixpulvis | 10 hours ago
There will always be new questions, one that even AI cannot figure out alone. Things that require other environments or polled feedback. Making these channels indexable on the internet is critical to the progress of information.
2001zhaozhao | 10 hours ago
Furthermore, what if someone wants to opt-out of their messages being indexed in some Discord servers but not others? I don't see that option being available right now.
anonymous908213 | 9 hours ago
"Messages from before mid-December 2026 aren’t included, regardless of your setting." Seems like they thought of this, at least.
loa_in_ | 2 hours ago
arjie | 10 hours ago
yunnpp | 9 hours ago
anonymous908213 | 8 hours ago
morder | 5 hours ago
anonymous908213 | 5 hours ago
burnoutdv | 35 minutes ago
Back in the old days (tm) you would post (maybe under a pseudonym) in the internet and dont care that much. Someone could theoretically stalk you through all the sites with moderate effort and depending on how far back we are on the timeline, but still, the Internet felt somewhat private (an illusion) sure, but for a vast amount of people, your post on furry-forum-24 was probably never seeing the light of day outside of that specific space and then it got shuttered 2007. LLMs make that so easy, filing everything away, the web is already thousand times crawled over, but now there are handy tools to search it more easily, with vague concepts, see patterns with a way much bigger working brain so to speak. I myself are quite reluncatant to write anything on the internet these days that is to personal, which is a censorship in itself. I am not sure how it is in actual oppressive censorship states like china or the usa (if you got a left-ish opinion) but the will to not write anything personal is a loss of connection to strangers that was definetly there before. Usually in tiny tidbits that were harmless in itself. But now one can trivially gather all those tiny specs of data so easy..makes it hard to say anything anymore. Same if you are averse of helping the slop machine of getting more art, texts or thoughts.
TheRoque | 10 hours ago
pixeljam | 7 hours ago
bryanhogan | 7 hours ago
Especially for communities that have valuable discussions and support going on in Discord, Obsidian or Astro come to my mind, this is super helpful.
I do wonder about their motivations behind this, making the web a more open and user friendly place is obviously good for the users, how does Discord profit from this? Forcing users into creating an account to view valuable information seemed like a profitable thing for Discord.
j45 | 6 hours ago
pampas | 6 hours ago
aussieguy1234 | 6 hours ago
The servers I've joined typically have a lobby where you land right after joiming, and you need an admin to approve you before you get access to the actual channels
roosterIllusi0n | 5 hours ago
lacoolj | 5 hours ago
All privacy is just extra layers from the public. They want to remove all those layers (which in this case is just the barrier to entry of writing API calls)
Why tho
OnlyAProGamer | 4 hours ago
nuclearsugar | 3 hours ago
mastermage | an hour ago
Maybe it should be put in Forum Mode only or something. Because just finding random chats is likely not going to be helpful at all.