Pet peeve of mine: as I understand it Discord labels each of its communities as "servers". That's why you've probably encountered youngins calling subreddits or group chats "servers" lately. That's obviously a misnomer since it's not like they're technically independent servers (as showcased by this crash).
It's just vocabulary but for somebody like me who still hangs onto IRC even though it's been almost entirely displaced by proprietary and centralized solutions like Discord it really feels like they're rubbing it in. Just co-opting decentralized lingo with none of the actual features.
Wait until you see what Discord calls servers internally :) [0]
Jokes aside, I don't think there's anything about the term "server" that implies independence. I can think of many centralized access points that are called "servers" but aren't independent. Hell, even racks aren't necessarily independent.
I get what you're saying, but the term "server" can be pretty vaguely applied.
> * I don't think there's anything about the term "server" that implies independence.*
Communication is perception.
Simian above, and myself grew up in an era where a server did indeed imply independence. Counterstrike servers, IRC servers, FTP servers, all independent things in these contexts.
For others the perception may be different as I assume it is with anyone young who primarily encounters the word server in their Discord use.
And yet I'm convinced Discord chose this naming because it implies independence. It sounds a lot cooler to say "We got our own server" than "We started our own guild".
Discord replaced ventrillo and teamspeak for gaming communities. For those you actually ran a "server". Whether or not the company started out calling these accounts "servers" initially, that customer base sure did. It was the terminology customers were used to. They neither knew nor cared what the technical aspects were of having a separate server; it just what you called that thing that the team used to communicate.
Exactly - something difficult to do that not everyone could just do (or rent from a service, or have permanently running). Which is cool.
I'm saying this is an important element to Discord's early success precisely because it understood the gamer audience it was engaging, how it communicated and thought and the tools they were using. Discord allowed people who previously couldn't to "have a server". Which lead to a period of everyone "making" one, and then better ones survived. Not the only factor, but it contributed. I clearly remember how proud people were of their "servers".
I'm sure they knowingly made use of this fact and picked a term that implied more than it does in technical reality because it had social currency. If you play to an audience, understanding what it values and what generates status within it helps a lot.
That's only half true. While it's true that the in-game server browser would cease to function, you could absolutely still connect and play with people on independent servers. And this isn't a hypothetical; there were (probably still are) many independent server trackers and aggregators allowing you to find servers without Valve's servers being up. And I know that this all works because I'd host offline LAN parties with friends were we'd run all sorts of offline-compatible games like TF2, CS, Quake, Unreal, Halo, Sourceforts, Gmod, etc.
Back when I _did_ play CS, servers didn't rely on any online component. Many gaming places had their own local servers, and continued to run just fine when the internet was down.
Counter-Strike predates Steam by at least a few years. There was a time that game servers were fully independent and you could use third-party game browsers or even just go port scanning to find 'em.
That's kind of the point. As far as discord users should be concerned, servers are independent which is why the terminology chosen was "servers" which conveys a sense that one server is independent from another. The term doesn't necessarily mean they are on different hardware or physically separated.
This is speculation, but I believe this is a vestige of when voice chat applications widely used by PC gamers like TeamSpeak and Ventrilo did actually rely on independent servers, usually paid for and administered by individuals (or guilds/clans).
Back in the bad old days if you wanted to voice chat you had to know someone who could invite you to join a "server" (or set one up yourself), and I think the verbiage just kind of stuck.
Correct, this is the origin of the term. Before cloud services like Discord, people had to set up servers specifically to run TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, or Mumble. Discord has now largely/almost entirely replaced those applications, and it's just a vestige like "roll down the window".
The internal term of "guild" is more accurate, but no users actually call them that.
Not to disagree, but I don't really see how the old rotary handles suggested the term "roll down the window" either. What was rolling? If I were supposed to describe the old way without knowing an existing word for it, I'd say "crank" was the closest option.
True, it wasn't "rolling" in the sense of the physical action you performed or even what the crank did, but the crank did move in a circular motion, and things that roll also move in a circular motion, so it makes a little bit of sense, even if it's not really rolling. Not sure why that term stuck.
Is anyone else pretty bothered that popular services like Discord can and do read all of your 'private' messages in plaintext, and when/if they are bought out, all of your chat and usage history will be sold to an unknown third party along with the company?
I wish at some point we'd see mainstream messengers that put actual effort into respecting the user, along with their autonomy and privacy. It'd be amazing if we could actually directly (from a technical perspective) message other people, without needing central servers between us.
Not only that: if you send links to people in DM, their surveillance ability gives them a shoot-first-ask-questions-later option to counteract spam (or any false positives they mistakenly deem spam).
They suspended my account for linking three people I know personally to my own website. In DM. Not twenty, not some spam site, not strangers. They nuked my whole account with no recourse.
The ToS, of course, says you can't sue them, either in a class action or outside of one. Their ToS also bans political cartoons that "mock" anyone, again, even in DMs.
It's not possible to use Discord without agreeing to these terms.
Wait wait wait, what? You got banned for sharing a link in DMs? Are you certain none of the people you DM'd it to reported it? And it wasn't something blatantly malicious like a malware EXE?
If so, that would be a massive story that would get thousand of upvotes in the subreddit very quickly. That makes me think there might be something more to this.
My account was less than a day old, and both the initial registration, as well as the connection at the time of suspension were via Tor, which may account for the fact that it was incorrectly identified as spam.
Censorship is censorship, though; connecting via a privacy network should not suddenly mean you can't link your friends to your own website without getting summarily deleted.
It's not really a massive story; people simply don't give a shit that Discord is a surveillance/censorship platform.
I think amongst younger people there is a general sense of "they can read all of it on every platform, who cares anymore" fatalism, and anyone who refuses to participate on that basis or complains about it is seen as an inconvenient whiner who should just click AGREE on the ToS without reading it like everyone else did, and leak their physical location/residential address to Discord via their home IP or phone number, like everyone else did.
Unfortunately, I (and others like me) do not have that luxury. For physical safety reasons, if I cannot participate without leaking my location, I cannot participate at all.
>It'd be amazing if we could actually directly (from a technical perspective) message other people, without needing central servers between us.
How could you do this while also preserving network privacy between users? One of the big selling points of Discord is users can't see each other's IP addresses when they message or call each other. I believe you would need at least a simple relay in the middle to prevent that. Or layer it on some Tor-like anonymizing network, but I think that wouldn't be practical for this use case (especially video calls).
This is especially important for not just the typical privacy reasons: Discord is marketed heavily towards gamers, and some gaming communities are filled with script kiddies who rent "booter" (DDoS-for-hire) services to knock opponents online, to torment them and/or to gain an upper hand in games where disconnection means automatic forfeiture. This was one reason a lot of people switched from Skype to Discord, because Skype had many ways of seeing other users' IP addresses.
Yep, and of course it's all linked to your real life identity because they basically require a phone number to use their service. This was true too of, say, WhatsApp before it enabled encryption, but with Discord it's even more insidious because most users think they are using an online pseudonym to communicate, unconnected to their real identity.
From what I've gathered there is some sort of reputation system in place, such that most users creating accounts from reputable residential ISP IP addresses aren't asked for a phone number, but those creating accounts from Tor/VPNs/datacenters/etc often are.
Yes, but I am guessing also if your IP has been used for other accounts and certainly if you use multiple residential accounts from different places (I had my account disabled while travelling). It's pretty sensitive.
Why a political problem? What I see is that in general people don't care enough. It's not that they don't care about privacy, they just don't care enough to change platform over it.
In my view, people caring is part of politics. The word politics, as I use it, is acquisition, organization and exertion of power. That's directly connected to what peoples' perceptions and incentives are.
I'm not here to debate you on anecdotal data (I know 5 people off the top of my head who do use it).
It has a respectable 10,000,000+ installs on the google play store and ranks high on the apple store with 270,000+ reviews. Though not comparable with the likes of WhatsApp (which I personally use and prefer), I would not dismiss it as 'not' a mainstream option. We can agree to disagree for sure.
Nato has traditionally been an xmpp user. Now there are discussions about a successor. Matrix is being rolled out inside the french state (including the military) and there have been proposals to switch nato to it. I consider nato as well as french state employees to be "masses" of people.
The probability that somebody replies with a quote of the entire unencrypted thread when attempting to use PGP approaches 1 for long email chains. Encrypted email also leaks not just metadata but data since you can't encrypt subject headers.
I agree, it's not the most user-friendly of business models. Do you know how to make a more user-friendly business model profitable enough to appeal to investors?
This is not a rhetorical question. If I knew a way to make a more user-friendly service profitable enough to have a reasonable shot of gigadollar return on investment (which is what it takes to be interesting to venture capitalists), I might very well go ahead and put together a YC application, but right now, I don't know a way to do that. Do you?
I would prefer not having to use VC money to fund such an endeavour. This model needs to stop, maybe a change to a bootstrapped model + pay to use is the way to go.
I think that was responding to the call for "mainstream messengers that put actual effort into respecting the user, along with their autonomy and privacy." iMessage is closed-source and centralized, but from what I know of it, it does seem fair to say it doesn't violate people's autonomy or privacy in a significant way.
Depending on how you define popular, Matrix [1] fits here. Mozilla has switched from IRC to Matrix recently, and there are likely others I've forgotten or missed.
My work set up Discord for voice chat during WFH despite mine and my colleague's efforts to promote setting up a Matrix server with federation disabled.
We self-host just about everything else ourselves, but for some reason everyone flocked to Discord.
It's almost midnight in Europe, so you wouldn't have peak hours around this time. Which is not to say that people using Discord livestreaming for remote taching can't have overloaded it from other geographies.
Its easy to generate links to join a server and offers a large degree of control for the administrator. If you want to establish a community forum quickly with the flexibility to change its structure as the community grows its pretty nice.
It has the same draw that the php bbs pages had in the 90's and 00's.
In many Reddit communities you'll see "hey community x, here is my new discord server 'x'"
An extremely niche and obscure (single player) game I follow for example has four discord servers-about one for every three active posters in the community!)
I also got problems with Safari Books Online around lunch time.
But our Microsoft Teams meeting in the morning worked pretty well. Even that everyone was calling from home. (That is 10 connections while usually is just one meeting room and a couple of people from home or another location).
Google Photos search was also stuck for several seconds before getting results.
In general the web felt slow most of the day. I am not surprised that Discord service is suffering.
I think that's their point. It isn't a centralized service comparable to Discord that will be overwhelmed by the entire quarantined world bearing down on it at once.
Are you running your own IRC servers or using something like freenode? If the prior, your comparison is moot because there's plenty of other centralized self-hosted options that would work the fine (eg mattermost/rocketchat). Otherwise, many public IRC servers would experience a netsplit in these cases making them basically useless.
Not to be snarky, but did your IRC servers have 100% uptime because no one was using them? These services are all going down because they're seeing huge surges in usage; your servers absolutely would collapse under the same load.
All the IRC servers in the world couldn't support all the traffic discord gets in a typical day no matter how the load was distributed.
According to Wikipedia [0] Freenode has less than 100k users spread across 32 servers. The group of Discord channels (confusingly referred to as a server) for Roblox players has 300k [1]. The Chill Zone server, which doesn't have a topic and where people just chat, has 150k members and over 6 million messages in it's "#general" channel, and the discord server for the /r/teenagers subreddit has 21M in its "#general" channel. These constitute a tiny fraction of the number of text messages being sent over discord, which itself probably uses a tiny amount of bandwidth compared to the constant pictures and files being sent, not to mention the voice and video calls.
It's easy to have 100% uptime when you have a product so user-hostile that nobody uses it. Yes, Discord is an electron app that probably spies on you, but users don't really care about that compared to being able to read messages sent when their computer was turned off or getting notifications on their phone, etc.
Low volume servers couldn't handle the traffic high traffic servers could. Got it.
> but users don't really care about that compared to being able to read messages sent when their computer was turned off or getting notifications on their phone, etc.
I bet the also don't care about that compared to being able to actually send messages.
You are apparently arguing something incredibly different than me. You seem to be arguing that bad UX leads to low load, which makes 100% uptime hard. I'm arguing that it's the centralization that makes it hard. You aren't addressing that.
If Discord were decentralized, not all servers would have gone down today. Maybe not any. Maybe.
But also, there are a lot of alternatives that have better UX. Zulip and Matrix come to mind.
A series of fatal errors caused the majority of servers to become unavailable. We are working to revive all of these resources. Most users will be unable to connect while this work is ongoing.
That's microservices for you. Instead of one fatal error you have to fix there's multiple in different codebases at the same time
That's jumping to conclusions very quickly. I could easily say the same thing about a monolithic spaghetti codebase where a change in one place led to unintended consequences somewhere else.
"A series of fatal errors caused the majority of servers to become unavailable. We are working to revive all of these resources. Most users will be unable to connect while this work is ongoing."
"Any sufficiently complicated concurrent program in another language contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Erlang."
Akka, Microservices, half of Kubernetes... all are making similar observations and coming to different conclusions and/or battle plans based on the tools near at hand.
But it's not like monoliths don't have huge, even bigger problems with action-at-a-distance.
The problems that get you are a mix of simple human errors and subtle patterns of side effects that are difficult to spot or predict. Simple errors are easy to fix wherever. Emergent behavior is much harder to cope with.
I haven’t found multiple service architecture to have this issue in a careful, sufficiently large engineering org unless they share vulnerable infrastructure. There should not be any situation where multiple APIs are changing in a backwards-incompatible way simultaneously.
It's just vocabulary but for somebody like me who still hangs onto IRC even though it's been almost entirely displaced by proprietary and centralized solutions like Discord it really feels like they're rubbing it in. Just co-opting decentralized lingo with none of the actual features.