YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Discord will soon let anyone find public server messages through Google

136 points DeepLogin 3 hours ago 95 comments

privacyishuman 2 hours ago | parent

Fluxer is what people should look at if they're trying to get off discord.

Imustaskforhelp 2 hours ago | parent

Fluxer is amazing.

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 2 hours ago | parent

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?

Imustaskforhelp 1 hour ago | parent

> 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.

Have a nice day :-D

pavel_lishin 2 hours ago | parent

Do Fluxer, etc., solve the problem of discoverability that this is supposed to help with? Or is it just a not-closed platform?

DexesTTP 1 hour ago | parent

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.

john_strinlai 2 hours ago | parent

why Flxuer and not any of the other dozen or so replacements that have been mentioned every time a discord thread pops up?

DexesTTP 1 hour ago | parent

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)

hmartin 2 hours ago | parent

How does it compare to Zulip?

Zambyte 1 hour ago | parent

How does Discord compare to Zulip? Fluxer is functionally equivalent to Discord from a users perspective.

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 1 hour ago | parent

> Discord, Zulip, Fluxer

It's on Poob. Poob has it for you.

BorisMelnik 2 hours ago | parent

phpBB!

SOTGO 2 hours ago | parent

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

ganoushoreilly 2 hours ago | parent

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.

Freedom2 2 hours ago | parent

Do you have an example of opinions that are counter to the narrative that faced reprisal?

ganoushoreilly 2 hours ago | parent

Are you really questioning if there is reprisal against users or communities that don't toe the line? Cancel culture?

Let's talk Covid discussion, Hunter Biden's laptop, Political opinions, Discussions on Sexuality & Gender, etc. Ironically look at Bluesky last year and the efforts to switch because there was no longer suppression of certain opinions? (How'd that work out).

perchedonstilts 1 hour ago | parent

>Let's talk Covid discussion, Hunter Biden's laptop, Political opinions, Discussions on Sexuality & Gender,

Let's not. Your cherry picked list of topics reveals you'd never listen to opposition/reality.

cowlevel 1 hour ago | parent

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".

ganoushoreilly 1 hour ago | parent

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.

mvdtnz 50 minutes ago | parent

Discussion of Linux has been forbidden on /r/opensource because there's AI generated code in it.

ganoushoreilly 39 minutes ago | parent

That's just wild.

john_strinlai 2 hours ago | parent

im pretty sure most people moved to discord because it is easy and has a lot of nice features, not because they were scared of global thought police

axus 2 hours ago | parent

But they sure are upset now that Discord bans accounts based on reports to its thought police.

ganoushoreilly 2 hours ago | parent

Both things can be true.

john_strinlai 1 hour ago | parent

i doubt it is true for the majority, though.

in any case, i dont think the "hunter biden laptop" discord group is opting into this feature.

cowlevel 1 hour ago | parent

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.

add-sub-mul-div 1 hour ago | parent

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.

devilsdata 1 hour ago | parent

I've found that people with terrible opinions aren't happy to stay in their own groups. They want to be part of the nice groups.

Sharlin 1 hour ago | parent

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.

perchedonstilts 1 hour ago | parent

>Discourse and opinions counter to the narrative pulled people away from public discussion due to fear or reprisal / issues

This is such a far fetched/reactionary comment, that it's frankly surprising it hasn't been flagged.

Discord become popular because they capitalized on the emerging online gaming community in the 2010s by offering a convenient and most importantly FREE platform for people to hop online and game with friends/talk with strangers who shared a similar interest.

cowlevel 1 hour ago | parent

This is true but I think it's both.

The popular predecessor to Discord was TeamSpeak. It ran on your own servers and that made it hard to set one up. That's why Discord groups are called "servers", they were hijacking established teamspeak terminology their audience would be familiar with.

And reddit died around the same time by extreme over-moderation.

john_strinlai 1 hour ago | parent

>The popular predecessor to Discord was TeamSpeak.

dont forget about vent and mumble!

cowlevel 1 hour ago | parent

I don't think they were ever popular. It was always TeamSpeak.

john_strinlai 1 hour ago | parent

vent was massively popular. basshunter even has a chart-topping song about it. "Vi sitter i Ventrilo och spelar DotA" or "We're sitting in Ventrilo, playing DotA"

mumble, admittedly, not so much.

AllegedAlec 1 hour ago | parent

Vi sitter här i venten och spelar lite DotA

ganoushoreilly 1 hour ago | parent

Your response is the "Chef's kiss". It's exactly these kind of policing actions that drives content away from the masses.

No one said discord wasn't popular. It's substantially popular with gaming communities. It's also very popular with non gaming communities, many of which found it an an alternative to Reddit and others.

AllegedAlec 1 hour ago | parent

> This is such a far fetched/reactionary comment, that it's frankly surprising it hasn't been flagged.

"This is such a wrong thing to say that I'm surprised you haven't received reprisal for it"

Proving his point in real time

perchedonstilts 1 hour ago | parent

It's blatant rage bait/conspiracy thinking. I would argue it goes against HNs guidelines.

mvdtnz 51 minutes ago | parent

"How dare you make a claim I don't agree with. Your opinion should be flagged and hidden from the view of the public!"

It's like you custom designed your post to make his exact point.

Karrot_Kream 1 hour ago | parent

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.

JDups 1 hour ago | parent

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.

nitwit005 1 hour ago | parent

I'd say the evidence rather strongly suggests people are mostly going to discord to talk about video games and share anime art.

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 58 minutes ago | parent

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.

nitwit005 31 minutes ago | parent

Sure, but there are listings of the most popular Discords. Just scroll through them: https://top.gg/discord/servers/list/largest

The themes are pretty clear, and having a political discussion does not appear prominent.

tancop 25 minutes ago | parent

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.

nitwit005 20 minutes ago | parent

That it is used for other things is not in dispute by anyone.

nozzlegear 1 hour ago | parent

That's not at all why my WoW guild moved to Discord.

moralestapia 2 hours ago | parent

>many communities have moved from the open internet into Discord

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 1 hour ago | parent

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.

These are just network effects.

madrox 2 hours ago | parent

It's to get more users. This is only applying to servers meant to be public, which is probably already getting scraped

gdulli 1 hour ago | parent

It's a disgrace what the "open" internet has become.

burnte 1 hour ago | parent

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.

andrewflnr 1 hour ago | parent

Because it's actually a good experience in some ways. I mean, it's not great, but as a chat room it's fine.

mostlysimilar 1 hour ago | parent

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.

keithnz 31 minutes ago | parent

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.

andrewflnr 25 minutes ago | parent

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.

tancop 29 minutes ago | parent

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 guess its all subjective.

john_strinlai 56 minutes ago | parent

>I genuinely have zero idea why anyone uses it.

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 53 minutes ago | parent

i think a certain brand of hackernews user just likes being completely obtuse in a bid for superiority.

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 46 minutes ago | parent

But NixOS is not obscure once you get into it.

keithnz 35 minutes ago | parent

yep, many previous discussions on discord tend to result in many HNers poo pooing discord. All the things they say would happen never happened.

lrvick 31 minutes ago | parent

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.

RHSeeger 31 minutes ago | parent

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

- Can't be found in search engines

- Abysmal search functionality

- Abysmal discoverability

justsomehnguy 51 minutes ago | parent

> low-friction

is the key here

the same reason WhatsApp and Telegram won on their markets

plant-ian 47 minutes ago | parent

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.

morkalork 7 minutes ago | parent

There are discord communities around hobbies and shared interests that have nothing to do with gaming and have thousands of users.

But half the good is that they are not some wide-open, forever-indexed forum like reddit.

ElijahLynn 46 minutes ago | parent

To communicate with each other.

Aozora7 15 minutes ago | parent

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.

flxngll 2 hours ago | parent

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.

samtheDamned 2 hours ago | parent

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.

Imustaskforhelp 2 hours ago | parent

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*

john_strinlai 2 hours ago | parent

>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.

Imustaskforhelp 1 hour ago | parent

> 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!

freediver 2 hours ago | parent

Just to note that Google is not mentioned in the title and indeed nowhere in the article. Searching the web is broader than 'google'.

rdmuser 2 hours ago | parent

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.

myself248 1 hour ago | parent

It's like every smartphone is an iPhone, in the parlance of headlines. It's fewer letters.

NooneAtAll5 1 hour ago | parent

"through *googling* " might've been a better phrasing

rdmuser 2 hours ago | parent

You can opt out at an account level. I just checked and I'm already opted out so it seems like it might be using your previous data opt out settings.

CM30 1 hour ago | parent

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.

sohrob 57 minutes ago | parent

I've never gotten into using Discord because I find the interface to be way too busy.

mvdtnz 54 minutes ago | parent

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.

ElijahLynn 47 minutes ago | parent

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.

ibejoeb 46 minutes ago | parent

Maybe I'm jaded. Is this discord announcing that it is entering the training data business?

keithnz 39 minutes ago | parent

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).

xkcd-sucks 33 minutes ago | parent

Cool, but when will Google let anyone find public website content effectively?

nixonaddiction 31 minutes ago | parent

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.)

CreepyHunterX 20 minutes ago | parent

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.

EA-3167 17 minutes ago | parent

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.

nixpulvis 8 minutes ago | parent

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.

2001zhaozhao 4 minutes ago | parent

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.